Home from the Hill by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page A

black, might have been better suited for the Captain’s; but white, signifying innocence, was no doubt right, even then, for Theron. For wasn’t that just Theron’s trouble, just what led to everything, his innocence?
    He could do this, for instance, when he was seventeen:
    One Saturday afternoon that summer he rounded the northeast corner into the square, when a boy his age named Dale Latham, whose hatred he had unconsciously earned by his odd combination of innocence and manliness—innocence which the manliness had already given him so many fine opportunities to lose (Dale had seen them; Theron himself had not)—was suddenly provoked by the sight of him to violate the respect which even he and his gang, the smart ones, the ones with their own notion of manhood, who loitered outside the drugstore on Saturday afternoons, affecting to despise the boys who hung on the edge of the circle of hunting men, had so far kept towards Theron Hunnicutt. Dale Latham sauntered out and confronted him and said—but with a huskiness that robbed it of some of the sarcasm and most of the swagger he had meant it to have, “Why, hello there, Theron. How’s the old cocksman? Getting much lately?”
    The sound of this and the look on Theron’s face were as much as was needed to assemble the beginning of a crowd, for a fist-fight somewhere on the square was the main event of every Saturday afternoon, and everybody was always on the alert for the first sign. So Dale Latham bolstered up the smile that had begun to droop somewhat faced by Theron’s stare, and because he had not heard quite the volume of snickers he had counted on from his gang at his back, and repeated (he had no shadings in his sarcasm, and even for an audience could not embellish his simple text, he could only italicize) “Been getting much? I said.”
    He found himself stepped around carefuly, like some community cur, and looked upon with an expressionlessness that drove him wild.
    â€œI guess you don’t know what I mean,” said Dale, thinking this to be about the worst taunt he could offer. Dale was suffering from half a suspicion that the little girl who had failed for so long to be very much impressed with him was secretly longing for Theron Hunnicutt. This alone would have been bad enough, but the thing Dale could not forgive was that Theron did not even know, much less care, that he had been preferred to him. Theron was moving away, and Dale, suspecting now that he actually disdained to fight him, called out, “You’re yellow.” This did not stop Theron, so Dale added, “And so’s your old man.”
    Somebody in the crowd laughed loudly. Theron stopped, laughing himself, and turned to see who had done it.
    It brought an approving chuckle from the crowd, which made Dale glower and turn red. His effort to find something clever to retort was visible on his face. The only quarter in which he seemed to find any support was his gang, so to them he said, nodding towards Theron, “He still thinks it’s for peeing through.”
    And the next thing Dale knew he was sitting on the sidewalk with his legs straight out before him and his back against the wall of the drugstore which had suddenly been bared for his backward passage, and he was sucking a gap from which two teeth had smiled out at him in the mirror as he snapped on his ready-tied bow tie before stepping out downtown that noon.
    Was it any wonder then that it had changed our tone considerably when, a couple of years before that incident, the Captain first brought Theron in to sit with us on the corner of the square? It was rather as if he had brought Mrs. Hannah. Other boys had moved in from the fringes and taken their places among the men, and most of them, in the beginning, had seemed disappointed and embarrassed and would look down, look away and pretend not to have heard, when the passing of some girl would put a stop to the hunting talk