ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 116
daughter. She now looks at the Younger and sucks air through her
little cigar. Undirected malice huddling in her demanded propagation. “A boy needs more than vegetables Annie, give him something
to eat, a sandwich or somewhat, with some meat.”
This is what is said, but it is impossible that this is what is heard.
Annabelle the Younger hears something which combines with the
sight of her hands and Jude’s skin, the smell of Jude’s transformed
broccoli, the heat of the summer sun, the pain of her own failing digestion, and the sound of the Elder sucking at her cigar and
becomes a powerful machine that squinted her eye and made it roll
and twisted her lip. “Goddammit, I’m grown and I heard what Ruth
said to do with that little half- nigger!”
And she rumbles back in the house and her long red skirt is a
crimson swirl about her and she smells Jude’s paste. He smiles and
says, “No, you,” and laughs.
“Did you shit yourself, boy?”
He laughs.
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She grabs him by his arm with terrible excess of force, and before
he can stop smiling, he feels the pulleys and levers of his little arm
and shoulder come apart, the disjointed appendage in his mind
becoming bound with his aunt’s likeness and the sun in the kitchen
window and the heat of the summer day, all the production of his
and his aunt’s eating and what followed therefrom. He is uplifted by
her force and remade, and Annabelle is party to Ruth’s creation, a
cog in a machine she cannot see. When, in years to come, he feels
the click in his shoulder he will have a confusion which the only
knowing of facts. His first wife, who will have a scar like his mother’s after he hits her with the iron will ask him, “Does your shoulder
hurt when it clicks like that?”
