See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online Page B

Heracles, to steady himself from this collision, grabbed Mr. Sweet’s entire testicles and threw them away and he threw them with such force that they landed all the way in the Atlantic Ocean, which was Then and is so Now hundreds of miles away. The testicles then fell into that great body of water but did not produce typhoons or tidal waves or hurricanes or volcanic eruptions or unexpected landslides of unbelievable proportions or anything at all noteworthy; they only fell and fell quietly into the deepest part of that body of water and were never heard from again.
    Oh, the silence that descended on the household, the Sweet household, as it lived in the Shirley Jackson house: on poor Heracles, who paused for a very long time at the top of those stairs; on his sister as she curled up in her bed and went to sleep like a single bean seed planted into the rich soil of a treasured vegetable garden; Mr. Sweet removed his fingers from the strings of the lyre; on the dear Mrs. Sweet, who froze over her mending, her knitting, the darning needle in her hand, the knitting needles in her hands just about to pierce the heel of some garment, just about to make complete some garment. And then gathering up herself, surveying what lay in front of her, Mrs. Sweet sorted among the many pairs of socks she had been mending over and over again and removing a pair, she fashioned a new set of organs for her beloved Mr. Sweet, trying and succeeding in making them look identical to the complete set of testicles that had belonged to him and had been destroyed accidentally by his son, the young Heracles. And when Mr. Sweet fell into a sweet sleep of despair after not knowing what to do regarding his lost testicles, Mrs. Sweet sewed the mended socks into their place, the heels of the socks imitating that vulnerable sac of liquid and solid matter that had been Mr. Sweet’s testicles.
    By then, oh yes then, the beautiful brown hands of the beautiful and dear Mrs. Sweet had turned an unhappy white, all bony and dry. The rest of her remained beautiful brown, a brown that glistened and shone, a brown so unique to her, no other Mrs. Sweet could ever be brown in that way, so glistening, so shiny, so glowing, making her sometimes seem as if she were a secret form of communication, a point of light colliding with the tip of her ear might signify something, might be a signal that enormous changes should be set in motion; or the morning light, briefly coming through the window that was just above the kitchen sink, and for a moment landed on the flat point that was the tip of Mrs. Sweet’s flat nose, as she stood there drawing water to make breakfast coffee; the light then would cause such a flash that it could have been taken as a warning against impending cataclysms. But the unhappy whiteness of the bony and dry hands was of no interest to Mrs. Sweet, they blended so well with the worn socks that had to be constantly mended. So Mrs. Sweet went on from then to now and back again.
    Then, the time came, out of the blue, when Mr. Sweet fell upon his anger, for he had to face an unavoidable fact, Heracles had grown half a foot in one year, and if he did not stop doing that right now he would soon be much bigger than Mr. Sweet. How Mr. Sweet raged quietly in the sunless studio above the garage. To commemorate these feelings, his loneliness, his solitude, his everlasting bereavement, Mr. Sweet wrote a fugue for an orchestra made up of one hundred lyres. “There,” he said to Mrs. Sweet presenting to her the score in its entirety, one hundred pages long, “isn’t that original, isn’t that something no one has ever done before.” And Mrs. Sweet, so dear and so sweet she was, knew and so did not have to be told, that she knew nothing at all about music and wondered to herself, where would she find, within the vicinity of the Shirley Jackson house, one hundred musicians who specialized in playing the lyre. The lyre! As she sat at the desk Donald had made for her, a