Poorhouse Fair by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

with hockey sticks during recess. Breaking up the screaming ring he had found as its center a grey pelt wildly pulsing with the parasitic life that refused to loosen its grip, and had had to dispatch it himself, weeping and trembling, with a hatchet brought up from the basement, while the pupils were within with their books. As he imagined it there had been a storm brooding that day; children invariably became unruly under the approach of wet weather.
    They were hurrying because Gregg, on fire with his idea, was going to the kitchen to beg scraps for his new pet. Hook, bewildered by the sudden introduction of the animal into his morning study, had gone with him a distance, but at the corner of the big house, he realized it would not do to accompany him further. "You proceed," he said, "I want noth-ing to do with such monkey business."
    "Okay, Hookie," the little man said, rudely using a nickname Hook had overheard before but always chose to forget, "You stay here and keep an eye on the tiger. Don't let the cops see it before I give the word."
    Fanciful talk. Gregg imagining that a lame cat on these acres would be observed. Superimposing his memory of difficult students on Gregg, he perceived the true motive for his act: it was a disturbance of accustomed order. In abruptly vaulting the wall and dropping at Hook's feet this live responsibility he was making a sardonic comment on the elder man's brittle ways, which could not comfortably deviate a hair from worn paths. Hook smiled to himself. It was different now; teaching school, he had been bound to the students, but here there was no law forcing him and Gregg into association. It did not occur to him that, though Gregg in part may have been teasing his stately old friend, it was Conner's authority the cat's presence flaunted.
    Obediently--in a life as empty of material purpose as Hook's, there was little substance to resist any command --he fixed his gaze on the spot far down the wall, where they had been standing. Though his sight possibly deceived him, there was no cat there. He was principally pleased. At his age it was not difficult to believe he had imagined the entire incident, and the cat in his misery was phantasmal. To strengthen his case against Gregg's certain reproval, he scanned all the distant terrain this side of the wall, looking especially under the tables and around the feet of the women. Nothing but trod lawn. The sky in the southeastern quarter was unmistakably darkening now; the thunder-heads had moved up into the sky, grounded no longer on the horizon but jutting from the dense atmosphere like blooms trailing their roots in murky water.
    In fact at the moment he first looked the cat was within yards of his feet, and while he inspected the distance the cat had passed his ankles and gone and hidden among the sheds in the back of the house. Hook, blind in all directions but the forward one, was vulnerable to approach from below. He was amazed when a voice by his side spoke.
    "Good morning, Mr. Hook."
    "Eh? Ah, Mr. Conner; pardon my not responding. I would make a better lamp-post than a spy."
    "Are you admiring the view?" Conner was a head shorter than he, with a smooth face that had little harm in it, discounting the sureness and appetite of the young. His eyes were a remarkably light brown.
    "Why, yes. It seems overcast."
    "I'm hoping that the clouds will be blown around to the west."
    A corner of Hook's mouth dimpled at the folly of such hope. The rain was upon them now, in his mind. "The rain would be a great dis-service to the preparations," he admitted.
    "WNAM predicted fair and cooler at six this morning."
    "These forecasters, now,"--Hook waggled a surprisingly shapely finger upwards--"they can't quite pull a science out of the air."
    Conner laughed, encouraged to be striking sparks of life from this gray monument, which had held so abnormally still as he had approached it. Then he insisted, a bit prig-gishly, "Everything, potentially, is a science, is