See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online

Heracles skipped away to the car, an old Volkswagen Rabbit in which they would drive to the bowling alley, and did not hear his father say those words. Just before they entered the bowling alley, Mr. Sweet fell and broke the bone in the smallest finger of his right hand and so for a short time was unable to play on the pianoforte a melody written by a German man in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Mrs. Sweet stood still. She loved them both so much, the young Heracles, her husband Mr. Sweet dressed up in the brown corduroy suit which hugged his body so closely, he looked like one of the earliest mammals.
    Mrs. Sweet was the mother of Heracles and this was as natural and certain as the daily turning of the earth itself. Mrs. Sweet loved the young Heracles, she loved him so and paid special attention to all his needs and indulged him in all his many amusing whims: wanting to see the machines that remove snow—snowplows—at rest in the municipal garage where they were stored when their giant blades were not pushing aside the high drifts of snow. How Heracles loved to see that, miles and miles of road covered with snow and the snowplows clearing this away, making a path through it. So too he loved to see tall buildings being assembled with machinery groaning so loudly that he could not hear Mrs. Sweet telling him how much she loved him. And he loved to put on only warm clothes and Mrs. Sweet would cause the sun to shine and make his clothes warm and, if not that, place them in the clothes dryer and warm them up. Heracles liked his clothes warm when he put them on and Mrs. Sweet would make them so. But it was Heracles who was natural to Mrs. Sweet not the other way around. Heracles regarded Mrs. Sweet with disdain and this was correct, for the weak should never be in awe of the strong.
    She fretted and worried and became vexed as she thought of his life as he would live it. What if Heracles wandered out of the yard in pursuit of one of those balls, be it golf ball, basketball, baseball, football, he playfully and violently made sail through the air? The yard of the Shirley Jackson house had a border. That border was the seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. But no matter the season, no matter the weather, Heracles played with those balls, Mrs. Sweet mended and knitted those socks, Mr. Sweet lay down on a couch in the dark studio.
    Heracles now bends down to pick up his shy Myrmidon, a gift he received in his Happy Meal that Mrs. Sweet had bought for him at McDonald’s. The shy Myrmidons, tiny figures in blue and green and red plastic, were shy; they clasped their shields to their breasts and held their spears aloft, always ready to strike out and inflict pain, imaginary death. When Heracles was four and five and six, he used to line them up against each other on the stairs just outside his room, battlefields, and these plastic figurines would demolish figments, brave figments, over and over again, and then would rest so weary were they from the fighting, and then an unsuspecting and innocent Mr. Sweet would step on their abandoned form and sometimes almost break his neck tumbling down the stairs from that encounter. Oh shit, he would say and then look quickly around, his eyes darting here and there quickly, as if controlled by a mechanical contraption, the little bastard, the little shit. But his mother loved Heracles and took him to McDonald’s to buy his Happy Meals, even when she was unhappy and did not know that she was so, happiness being the sphere of Heracles and his father and her daughter the beautiful Persephone and the shy Myrmidons, made of plastic or not, and any everything else as it came up in the Shirley Jackson house. Heracles then bends down to pick up a shy Myrmidon, Then being the same as Now, Then from time to time, becoming Now.
    The shy Myrmidons were sometimes lined up, set up in formations, ready to do battle with and triumph over a set of adversaries, whom Heracles could not see but