Fights - Is shot - To Galveston - Nacogdoches -
The Reverend Green - Judge Holden - An affray - Toadvine -
Burning of the hotel - Escape.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes
the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods
beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and
drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he
quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches
him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did
fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who
would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He
has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed.
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.
All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the
predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a
solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and
stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the
garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper
skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown
bottomland toward night.
A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat.
Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the
black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and
he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room
above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook
beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His
shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the
eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all
breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and
queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind
