Set This House on Fire by William Styron Read Free Book Online Page B

and horror. He was still breathing but rather tentatively; one eye socket was pink and sunken (I thought this my doing), and with a grisly feeling I glanced around me for the missing eye. For a long while, or so it seemed, no one was around and no one came: it was a country crossroad, high noon in the sultry summertime, with insects humming and the smell of weeds, and with hawks that looked like buzzards circling high over the blazing fields. For what felt like an endless time I kept trampling around the prostrate di Lieto, reeling with shock and heaving shudders of anguish.
    What followed immediately afterward seemed to be only a grotesque fantasia of events lacking sequence or order, in which I am able to pick out mostly random impressions, as of scenes from a movie film dimly remembered. I do recall finally a car moving out of the horizon, a dusty rattletrap weaving leisurely, which I hailed, and then two Pompeian matrons, profoundly emancipated, fuddled with wine, in rustles and flounces of shiny black silk, who debarked unsteadily from the heap and blinked in the dazzling sunlight, uncomprehending. “What is this here?” they murmured, stooping over di Lieto, and then spied the blood, clutched their hands to their breasts, and commenced sending up boozy entreaties to the Pompeian Madonna. “Santa Maria del Rosario! Povero ragazzo!” What happened to him? they cried. One, with an incomprehension that added brutal fire to the hellishness of the moment, asked me if he had fallen from a tree; immediately they wanted to pour water on him, turn him over, move him. I tried to tell them he must not be touched; only when my voice had risen to a hoarse cracked shout did they stop their outcry and clatter back to town for help.
    In the long space that followed I sensed the heights of Vesuvius looming oppressive at my back. I sat on the bumper of the car and gazed toward di Lieto, who kept pluckily breathing, twitching a little and awaiting our rescue: it came at last and in a deluge. Cars began to stop, and trucks and carts; as if summoned there by hungry intuition a small village full of people appeared at the spot, trooping from all four directions toward the crossroad, galloping in clouds of dust across the fields. It was as if in an instant the desolate scene had been transformed into one of bustling life, every soul for miles gathered to the place with the instinct of a flock of homing, weather-wise birds. I remember only sitting head in hands on the bumper while they milled about, bending over di Lieto, pressing their ears to his chest for the heartbeat and making solemn pronouncements. “It’s just a concussion,” one said. “No,” said another, an old stripped-to-the-waist farmer with skin burnt brown as a mummy, “his spine is broken. That’s why we mustn’t move him. Look, see how he twitches in the legs. That’s always the sign of a broken spine.” The crowd shuffled, jabbered away in a spirit both grave and somehow enraptured; many had brought parts of their interrupted lunches; they stood there looking on contentedly, munching on bread and cheese and passing around bottles of wine. A man asked me gently how I felt and if I was hurt; someone else gave me a shot of brandy, which quickly set me to retching. “Fessacchiotto,” I heard a glum voice say through the spinning blue as I heaved, “the Stumblebum finally caught it.” Then I saw two motorcycle cops, helmeted like spacemen, brake to a stop at the crossroad. They shooed the crowd toward the ditches like a swarm of buzzing flies and forthwith set up camp, making lordly measurements of my skid marks, stalking around the car and unearthing all sorts of data.
    “Please. You going these machine?” one said deferentially.
    “I speak your language,” I told him.
    “Allora, va bene.” When the collision occurred, was the Lambretta approaching the highway from the right or from the left? He was a conscientious-looking man in wringing poplin, very