The Early Stories by John Updike Read Free Book Online

attacking the chemical-fertilizer crooks. The monster firms.”
    A cup clinked in the kitchen. Mother’s anger touched David’s face; his cheeks burned guiltily. Just by staying in the living room he associated himself with his father. She appeared in the doorway with red hands and tears in her eyes, and said to the two of them, “I knew you didn’t want to come here but I didn’t know you’d torment me like this. You talked Pop into his grave and now you’ll kill me. Go ahead, George, more power to you; at least I’ll be buried in good ground.” She tried to turn and met an obstacle and screamed, “Mother, stop hanging on my
back!
Why don’t you go to
bed?
”
    â€œLet’s all go to bed,” David’s father said, rising from the blue wing chair and slapping his thigh with a newspaper. “This reminds me of death.” It was a phrase of his that David had heard so often he never considered its sense.
    Upstairs, he seemed to be lifted above his fears. The sheets on his bed were clean. Granmom had ironed them with a pair of flatirons saved from the Olinger attic; she plucked them hot off the stove alternately, with a wooden handle called a goose. It was a wonder, to see how she managed. In the next room, his parents grunted peaceably; they seemed to take their quarrels less seriously than he did. They made comfortable scratching noises as they carried a little lamp back and forth. Their door was open a crack, so he saw the light shift and swing. Surely there would be, in the last five minutes, in the last second, a crack of light, showing the door from the dark room to another, full of light. Thinking of it this vividly frightened him. His own dying, in a specific bed in a specific room, specific walls mottled with a particular wallpaper, the dry whistle of his breathing, the murmuring doctors, the dutiful relatives going in and out, but for him no way out but down, into that hole.
Never walk again, never touch a doorknob again
. A whisper, and his parents’ light was blown out. David prayed to be reassured. Though the experiment frightened him, he lifted his hands high into the darkness above his face and begged Christ to touch them. Not hard or long: the faintest, quickest grip would be final for a lifetime. His hands waited in the air, itself a substance, which seemed to move through his fingers; or was it the pressure of his pulse? He returned his hands to beneath the covers, uncertain if they had been touched or not. For would not Christ’s touch
be
infinitely gentle?
    Through all the eddies of its aftermath, David clung to this thought about his revelation of extinction: that there, in the outhouse, he had struck a solid something qualitatively different, a base terror dense enough to support any height of construction. All he needed was a little help; a word, a gesture, a nod of certainty, and he would be sealed in, safe. The reassurance from the dictionary had melted in the night. Today was Sunday, a hot fair day. Across a mile of clear air the church bells called,
Celebrate, celebrate
. Only Daddy went. He put on a coat over his rolled-up shirtsleeves and got into the little old black Plymouth parked by the barn and went off, with the same pained hurried grimness of all his actions. His churning wheels, as he shifted too hastily into second, raised plumes of red dust on the dirt road. Mother walked to the far field, to see what bushes needed cutting. David, though he usually preferred to stay in thehouse, went with her. The puppy followed at a distance, whining as it picked its way through the stubble but floundering off timidly if one of them went back to pick it up and carry it. When they reached the crest of the far field, his mother asked, “David, what’s troubling you?”
    â€œNothing. Why?”
    She looked at him sharply. The greening woods crosshatched the space beyond her half-gray hair. Then she showed him her profile, and