Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online Page A

wanted anything. Bruce and his mother sat in the kitchen. Once, coming in for hot water to make a toddy, his father stopped in the doorway to talk for a moment. He parted his hair in the middle and slicked it down like some old-time German bartender with a sense of vocation. As he stood flicking his towel, his eyes drifted over to the table where the breadboard lay with its walls and ditch half molded and its wad of blue clay in the middle. His glance came back across Bruce’s like saw teeth across a nail. Through the register, sounding plain but far away, there was a dark, remote throbbing, the last beats of the slap-tongue sax, and the voice started chanting, with what seemed inappropriate vivacity,
    Nobody lied when they said I cried over you.
    Nobody lied when they said that I ’most died over you
    Got so blue I don’t know what to dooooo.
    All my life before me looks so dreary and so black
    I think I’ll choose the river and I’ll never come back …
    “Don’t you want some pie?” Brace’s mother said.
    “I’ll get it later,” his father said, and took the teakettle and left.
    After supper Bruce went straight back to the
castra.
He wanted to take it to school with him in the morning and dazzle Miss Van Vliet with the speed of his accomplishment, and force reluctant admiration from the big and stupid, and set the girls to twittering. One girl in that class thought he had a roguish face—someone had told him. The knowledge was like a secret twenty-dollar gold piece in a deep pocket that no one knew of.
    Carefully he went on smoothing the clay into walls, gates, rows of little tents. He would make such a
castra
as Caesar and all his legions had never thrown up in all the plains and mountains of Gaul—roguish Bruce Mason, that bright little boy, with the spirit the teachers liked to see.
    Behind him his mother tipped the coal scuttle into the range. From the sound, he knew there was nothing in it but dust and papers, but he did not rise to get her a new bucket of coal. He bent his head and worked on in great absorption while she went past him and the door let a cold draft across his feet and closed again, while the returning scuttle knocked against the door and then went down solidly on the asbestos stove mat. Later there was a noise of dishes in the pan, the smell of soap and steam. Nothing disturbed him. Eventually she stood behind him and he heard the squeak of a towel on china.
    “Oh!” she said, pleased. “It’s a little fort!”
    “It’s a
castra
,” he said in scorn. “A Roman camp.”
    About seven-thirty his father came in again. “Have your pie now,” Bruce’s mother said. “I’ve kept it warm. Who’s in there?”
    He took the slab of pie in his clean, round-nailed hand. “Just Lew McReady and his lady friend, now.”
    “His lady friend. One week he’s here with his wife, and the next with his lady friend. Which one, that nurse?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I wonder if she knows he’s got children seventeen years old?”
    “Oh, Lew’s all right. He just likes a change.”
    He was trying to kid her, but she would not be kidded. Glancing up under his brows, Bruce saw her unbelieving look. “What a life we lead,” she said. “What friends we have.”
    “If you can’t tell the difference between a friend and a customer you don’t know which side your bread’s buttered on.”
    “Maybe that’s the trouble. All we have is customers.”
    “If we’re starting on that again,” he said, “I’m going back in the dining room and read the
Post.
”
    With a push of the shoulder he was gone from the doorway. Bruce’s mother smiled at him bleakly. He made no response—went on smoothing with the back of a paring knife the triangular bits of clay that served as tents. Their wrangling was not his concern. He did not live in that house. He lived at school, where teachers lighted up when he came around and girls thought he had a roguish face. In this country inhabited by hostile barbarians he