The Sound of Thunder

  Edward, almost as amazed as his father at what he had said, could have answered with truth, “Right this minute and not a second before.” He contemplated his own words, and then, before his inner eye, the past few months rose up before him clearly, and he thought, It all began the day Ralph killed Betsy, and it went on to Billy, and all the insults I’ve been taking lately from the kids, and Ma’s letting everyone think she thought up the idea of expanding. All of a sudden I’ve begun to think, and thinking of ten dollars for me, putting in all that work and never anything in sight just for me, sounds like a damn good idea! I’m willing to work the way I do, not getting any education, not asking much, just as anxious as Pa is and maybe more, for his sake, that the kids develop themselves, but I want a little justice for myself!

  He looked at his father without speaking for some very long moments, and in those moments he stepped forever from boyhood into manhood. He could even say with gentleness, “Pa, maybe I’ve been thinking you ought to be just to me, too. I haven’t seen a vaudeville show since I was twelve, maybe eleven, years old, because I was always here after school. And what you gave me, mostly, went to the fund for the kids. I had that drummed into me all the time—for the kids. Ever since I can remember. Maybe I’m not a genius but I’m a human being. You and Ma take the kids to shows and you take them to the nickelodeon when it’s open, and to picnics in the summer, and to church socials. But I never go anywhere; I’m always here. I’ve got a right to something, after all my work. And I want a bicycle and some other things.”

  Heinrich sat down heavily on his stool and rested his elbows on the center counter and held his face in his hands. He shook his head somberly, rolling it in his hands and sighing deeply. Once or twice he coughed and murmured half under his breath. Edward was freshly surprised at himself for not feeling his usual contrition whenever he disturbed his father. Neither did he feel a rush of eager and consoling words to his lips. There was only a hard emptiness in him, and a still bright anger.

  “I’m going to make myself a couple of sandwiches and go down to eat with Billy,” he said. “And I’ve got to know if you’re going to be just to Billy, too, so I can give him the good news or tell him to quit. I hired him. He won’t stay just for you.”

  Heinrich groaned. He thought of Maria and winced. “I do not know my son,” he muttered pathetically. “Over and over he has agreed with me that all must be for the geniuses and their education. He understood. And now, all at once, he does not understand, he refuses his burden, his destiny, his place in the world, his obedience. What is it, what is it!” he cried, lifting his head and showing easily brimming eyes and absolute bewilderment and innocent misery. “Tell me, Eddie! I am your father. I will try to understand.”

  Edward straightened up and turned away and began to slice pink ham for his sandwiches. He said, almost as if to himself, “Who says it’s my burden, my destiny, my place, my obedience? I took it on myself. Maybe I’ve been wrong all the time. Maybe I’ve been right. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find it out too late. But I’ve got to have a little justice for Billy even more than for myself.”

  Heinrich, feeling that he was alone in the big shining shop with a stranger and feeling a fear of that stranger, sat and shook his head over and over. None of Edward’s plea for himself and Billy seemed comprehensible to him. A spark of indignation quivered in his misery. It was all so plain to him, the sacrifices for the geniuses. In a way, those sacrifices were noble and should be accepted almost with gratitude. Was it not Luther who had said, “To be singled out by Almighty God to carry the burden of service, yes, even of martyrdom, is an awesome sign of His favor”? He and Edward had been so singled out. Without them, the geniuses would languish in dark obscurity, and the world poorer for it.

  Heinrich wanted to convey these thoughts to Edward, as he had conveyed them before, and he opened his mouth to speak. But suddenly he saw Edward’s profile, as formidable in its way as Maria’s, and he thought, Why, my son resembles his mother! Never did I see it before! He became even more frightened. He watched Edward neatly and carefully make up the sandwiches, and he heard the silence in the shop, a silence broken only by the slight hissing of the big gas globes hanging from the ceiling, and the winter wind outside.

  Edward laid the sandwiches on a piece of butcher paper and turned to his father. He saw that Heinrich was very pale, almost gray, and for an instant his heart lurched weakly and he was remorseful. Then he thought of Billy. He said, “Well, Pa?”

  Heinrich said faintly, “What of the mother? When it is a matter of money I always tell the mother.”

  Edward smiled grimly. “Well, just don’t tell her this time. In fact, I absolutely insist you don’t tell her. If you do, I’ll tell Billy to go, and I won’t work here any longer.”

  “Eddie!” wailed Heinrich. “What is this you are saying? But you are not serious! My God,” he added with simple horror, “it is not true that you think it!”

  “About my quitting? Pa, I mean it. I’ll be fifteen on Christmas, and I can get a job somewhere in town, or maybe I’ll go to Albany. Anybody’d pay me twelve or fourteen dollars a week—anybody.” Edward was smiling, and it was a cold white smile. “I can pass for older than I am.” He leaned against the shelves and looked before him and not at his father. He wondered a little how he could feel this hollow emptiness, this peculiar lack of compassion, this imperviousness, in himself. Perhaps he was too tired; sometimes he was too tired to sleep. And lately he had not been able to speak to God or get an answer. There was a leaden resentment in him.

  It was an effort to lift himself away from the shelves, and he moved slowly toward the rear and the stairway to the basement. He stopped at the head of the stairs and turned about and looked questioningly at his father. Heinrich was gazing at him as at something he found incredible. But his son’s eyes, when they met his, made him almost leap from his stool.

  “Yes, yes!” he stuttered, throwing out his arms despairingly. “I agree! But Eddie—Eddie—!”

  “What?” asked Edward, his voice remote and gentle.

  I have lost my son, thought Heinrich. In these minutes, I have lost my son, and never until now did I know what the loss would mean to me.

  He dropped his face into his hands in a gesture of real anguish. Edward, watching him, frowned again, thoughtfully. He said, “Now, Pa, don’t be dramatic, as Ma says.” He waited, but Heinrich seemed to have forgotten him in his misery and Edward was ashamed. He took a step or two toward his father, and then he halted. He had gone through these scenes before, though they had been lesser scenes of lesser importance, and always, when he capitulated out of tenderness for his father or anxiety for his father, not only did he not get any part of what he had demanded but a part of whatever he had was taken from him, by his willing surrender. A fellow had to make a stand, sometimes, and I’ve never made any real stand before, except for the tree, thought Edward.

  “You’ve only agreed to the right thing, Pa,” said the boy. At that moment two women and three children entered through the wide doors of the shop, and Heinrich, still trembling and pale, automatically smiled his kind and naïve smile, got to his feet to wait upon them. Edward began to put down his sandwiches in order to help, then firmly took them up again. His father would be leaving very soon, and then he would have to work far past eleven o’clock. He went down the stairs, and his whole body was heavy and listless.

  The basement was warm but dim, for only one or two jets of gas were burning. Billy was shoveling coal into the red mouth of the furnace, and he turned his head and greeted Edward with his ineffably sweet grin. “About giving up hope you’d be coming down, Ed,” he remarked. “Man, this furnace sure eats up the coal! Can’t hardly leave it for more than half an hour or the steam goes down.” He wiped his sweating forehead with the patched sleeve of his striped blue shirt, and rested, panting, on the shovel. He, too, was tired, tired to the point of shivering.

  Edward laid his sandwiches beside Billy’s on one of the wooden chairs. “He
re, let me help you for a minute,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t have time today to come down and help you, but we could have used two more hands up there. I’d better start to think of that before long.” He took the shovel from Billy, who was too weary to protest. The boy was sure he had opened “thousands” of cartons that day, and had carried “millions” of boxes up the stairs, and had swept out the store “hundreds” of times. He watched Edward thrust the heavy iron shovel into the big pile of coal near the furnace, and nodded. “Yes, you sure do need help up there. You been running your feet off. I could hear you. You plant those feet down hard, boy, real hard! Your pa, now, he sounds almost like a lady.”

  Edward tossed the coals into the furnace, shoveled up more. His knees were shaking a little from exhaustion. Then suddenly they were shaking heavily and uncontrollably and there was an awful feeling of emptiness in his bowels and a curious sensation of collapse. He let the shovel slide out of his hands and he raised his head, looking about him blankly. Then there was the pain in his chest and his side again, but this time the pain was like the blow of a hatchet over his heart. He could not breathe, for every attempt to take his breath brought the hatchet blows to a pitch of unbearable intensity. He staggered and threw out his left arm to catch blindly at anything to prevent falling, and did not know that his body and arm sloped rapidly towards the very mouth of the big furnace. He was not conscious that Billy had caught him and had uttered a great, alarmed cry of terror, and he did not begin to recover from the reeling dizziness until Billy, half carrying him, half pushing him, had let him down on a chair.

  His hands seized the sides of the seat, and Billy supported his upper body against his own. “Holy Jesus,” said Billy, softly and reverently, and he gulped. “You almost went into that furnace, Ed. Jesus. What if I hadn’t been here? You’d have died, burned up like a cinder.”

  The basement was still a whirling darkness before Edward, but it was slowly coming into focus, slowly subsiding from its mad spiraling. The pain, too, began to recede like a red-crested sea. It was dull and threatening, but bearable, and now Edward could breathe. He did not know that his face was absolutely livid and that his lips were blue and that he was gasping weakly. He leaned his head against Billy and waited until the last throb of pain ebbed away.

  Then he thought of death.

  It was the first time that he had ever thought of death in connection with his own vital young life. It was something that happened to the old and the ill, the faceless ones, the people a person did not know. It never came to youth, to strength, to hope and courage. But now, all at once, Edward understood that it had cast its breath on him in dark passage and that he, like all the strangers, was in jeopardy. Never did he think it was his heart which had almost failed. It was still a mystery to him, but a most terrible one, and as the forces of his vitality surged in him again he was filled not with fear but with indignant wonder. He, too, could die mysteriously, and it was not fair that the young should die.

  “Here,” Billy was saying. “Drink the cold milk from the bottle. Jesus, you sure scared me almost to death, Ed. What’s the matter?”

  The cold milk in his dry mouth was revivifying, and he swallowed gratefully. “Guess it was all that rushing this week,” he said. “And all the work. Ten times the customers we usually have, and maybe I’ve got a cold. That makes you weak.”

  “I don’t know what it was,” said Billy, still quivering with dread. “But you looked like you were dying for a couple of minutes. You got too tired today. Well, it’ll soon be over, all this Christmas buying and things, and then you can settle down. But don’t forget about hiring more help.” He sucked in his own breath through a tight throat. “Maybe I’d better get your pa, and he can call a doctor for you.”

  “A doctor!” exclaimed Edward, sitting up straight. “What for? Don’t be dippy. Just for a cold or something! I remember, this morning, I could hardly get out of bed. Thought I was made of iron, stiff and heavy. Might be that grippe, la grippe, they talk about. Must be.”

  Billy cautiously stepped back from him, but with his hands ready. However, Edward was smiling. “I’m fine now,” he said. He shook his head vigorously. He pressed his hand with caution on his chest. “Could be pneumonia, too. No, I guess not. I’d have a fever and chills. That’s what I heard. Let’s eat our sandwiches.”

  Billy sat near him on the coal and they ate together. The Negro boy’s handsome face was very sober, and he kept glancing anxiously at his friend. He started when Edward suddenly laughed.

  “Billy, I’ve got good news for you. Pa decided tonight that you’re worth five dollars a week and all the food you can eat, free. What do you think about that!”

  Billy’s eyes glowed. “Honest? You mean that, Ed? Gee, your pa is a prince! I’ll go up right away and thank him. Five dollars! No taking out for the meals, either!” He jumped joyously to his feet, forgetting his weariness. Edward stopped him.

  “Don’t bother Pa now. Can’t you hear those feet coming in and out? Thank him some other time. Look, I brought a cheesecake, half of one, anyway. Just for us.”

  They ate the cheesecake happily. The furnace roared. It was warm and good to be here in the basement, resting and eating. It was better than anything Edward had ever known before. He looked about him and everything seemed more clear to him than at any other time, sharper, more exciting, more meaningful. He did not know how that was, but it was enough for him to know that it was.

  CHAPTER V

  Billy thanked Heinrich the next day, and Heinrich received the thanks with a stateliness that Edward found amusing. He had already forgiven his father, and his old tenderness, purged of anger, returned for Heinrich. He was unusually solicitous all that long and rushing day, and Heinrich, believing his son was repentant, became more dignified as the day went on. He was cheered that his appalling vision of the loss of his son had been only the result of a moment’s weariness. But still, Edward had been not only disrespectful but also threatening. One did not threaten his parents. It was commanded to honor thy father and thy mother. Had Edward been the slightest interested in religion, which he was not, Heinrich said to himself, he would have known that Commandment.

  At five that night Heinrich decided he would use Edward’s remorse as he had used the boy’s remorse before, to bring him to understanding. There was a lull in customers, and the two were alone, Edward whistling abstractedly through his teeth as he worked briskly. “Eddie,” said Heinrich in a wounded voice.

  “Yes, Pa,” the boy answered, the old brightness in his tone. Heinrich drew himself up to his diminutive height.

  “Eddie, I have considered that you were just in asking that Billy receive the extra money, though I will reconsider again after the work of the holiday is over. But it cannot be you were serious about yourself—the ten dollars a week—which would deprive the children.” He shook his head admonishingly at his son, and with reserve. He waited for Edward’s sheepish smile. He, Heinrich, would not forgive immediately. Edward did not smile. To Heinrich’s astonishment Edward was looking at him with that strange hardness again and that glitter of gray eye.

  “Five dollars extra a week won’t ‘deprive’ the kids,” said Edward. “Seven times that, or more, is being put into their fund every week. I know. I helped earn it. I don’t intend to be deprived myself, Pa.”

  Heinrich shrank, not from what his son had said, but from the dismal terror of his knowing that the vision of loss had been true and not merely his imagination. Impulsively, to destroy that vision, he put up his small pink palms in a gesture of warding off, of denial, of supplication.

  “Eddie!”

  Edward, not understanding, was not moved. “That’s right, Pa. I don’t intend to be deprived myself. Not too much, anyway.”

  “Eddie,” said Heinrich, and put his hand over his heart in an appealing gesture, such as a child would make. Now Edward smiled. “Oh, come on, Pa. What’s five dollars extra for me with all the money we’re making these days? It’s almost Christmas.
Let’s forget everything and let things be as they always were?”

  Heinrich flushed with joy. “Then it is not the five dollars you want?”

  Edward still smiled. “Yes, Pa, it is the five dollars I want. The extra five dollars. Now where do we put these new smoked sardines from Denmark? They deserve a special place.”

  Heinrich thought, I would give five times five if I could have my son again. I shall not speak of the money; it is a silence in my heart from this time on. Perhaps, then, he will be once more my son. I cannot endure that look in his eye, or that smile, as if he repudiated me or removed himself from me. I confess it to myself now that of all my children I love this son more than all the others.

  He said, in a meek and faintly tremulous voice, “Eddie, it is you who always choose the best places, and the red and the green paper, and the little artificial berries, to make the nice display. It is the imagination you truly have.”

  Edward was touched. He put his strong young arm about his father’s shoulders and squeezed them so vigorously that Heinrich gasped for breath, but it was a gasp that had the sound of weeping in it, and gratitude. He said, “You love your father, do you not, my son?”

  Edward squeezed him again but said cautiously, “Why, Pa, sure I do. You know that.” That extra five dollars! How his father gripped onto it. Then he saw Heinrich’s face below his and he was troubled. He did not understand that pleading expression, that expression of hope, of asking. He patted his father’s shoulder.

  “Eddie,” said Heinrich, “I am sorry about your bicycle. I know you are saving the money in the bank for it. And for Christmas I shall have the present for you.” He nodded like a child asking for love, and his eyes dimmed.

  “Pa!” exclaimed Edward incredulously. “I only need about nine dollars more.”

  Heinrich was full of mystery and importance. “We shall see, we shall see,” he answered, and moved away with a majestic tread while Edward followed him with his eyes and was troubled again.