Pride. William Wharton
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but he never looked for work. His wife got a job as a waitress at a bar up on Westchester Pike called the Sail Inn. Dad said you sailed in and staggered out. She ran away with the bartender there, at least that’s what the kids in the neighborhood say.
One Saturday morning, early, I was meandering down the alley looking for things on trash day. Even with everybody so poor, there is always something worthwhile in the trash. If you wait until it gets to the dump, most of the best stuff’s already been picked over by the guys on the truck, so you need to go out before seven and look before they come.
It was the beginning of that summer when we were building those last porches, but we didn’t work early Saturday mornings because that’s the day when Dad and Mom sleep late.
One morning I found a perfectly good Sunbeam toaster worth twelve dollars new. My dad fixed it in about an hour. It’s the kind that makes a ticking sound like a clock while it’s toasting the bread, then pops up the toast when it’s finished.
I also found an old portable Victrola in a black leather case like a suitcase. It’s one of those ones you wind up. Dad fixed that, too, and I keep it in the cellar to play sometimes in the evenings when I’ve finished homework or in summer when it’s too hot outside. I play old records Aunt Sophia gave me. They have great titles like ‘Just Like Washington Crossed the Delaware, General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine’, and ‘It’s the Japanese Sandman’.
So I’m going down the alley rummaging through trashcans and sometimes peeking into a garage when I look into Mr Harding’s garage and see him sitting all alone in his car in the garage. He looks blue and fat but I just think he’s drunk, maybe drove home, then fell asleep in his car before he could get out and go upstairs.
I go on down the alley and then back up the other side. When I get to Mr Harding’s garage, I peek in and he’s still there. It doesn’t look as if he’s even moved. I’m still thinking he’s only drunk when I go into the garage. But then I see his eyes are open, staring through the windshield, and his tongue is purple and swollen, sticking out of his mouth. His thick hands are wrapped tight on the steering wheel.
I’m sure he’s dead when I see the vacuum-cleaner hose attached to the tail pipe and going in the back window. It’s the first dead person I’ve ever seen except for my grandmother, my mother’s mother, and Aunt Emmaline. But they were different, in white coffins, and with flowers all around.
I run out of the garage, leaving the two comic books and a torn-in-half Little Orphan Annie Big Little Book I’d found on the Greenwood side at the end of the alley. I run home trying not to cry and trying at the same time to get my breath. I’ve never fainted but I think I’m almost doing it.
As I go in the cellar door, I first begin thinking how I’m going to tell Mom; and how I can keep from telling Laurel. I stand there and think of waiting till Dad comes home and telling him, I also think of going across the street, at the corner, on the other side of Clover Lane, and telling Mr Fitzgerald. He’s a policeman. But then I think how it might be a murder and they might think I did it. So by the time I get to the top of the cellar stairs I’m already yelling for Mom and crying.
She’s washing dishes in her dressing gown and comes running, thinking I’m hurt or something. She drops to her knees the way she always does when she wants to really look at me and see if something’s wrong, although now, when she does that, my head’s higher than hers.
‘Mr Harding’s in his car in his garage and he’s dead.’
‘What do you mean he’s dead?’
She’s still not believing me. She doesn’t look scared.
‘He’s sitting in his car and he’s blue and his eyes are open. He’s not drunk. He has the tube of his vacuum cleaner going from the back window to the tail pipe where the poison gas comes out. I think he’s dead, Mom.’
I’m shaking now and can hardly talk. Dead people look so alive and at the same time so dead. Mom stands up. She’s not looking at me now. She grabs her dark reddish hair by both sides over her ears and stares at me with her wide green-gray eyes. Sometimes her eyes look like the green stuff that grows on the creek in summer, they’re that green; now they’re more white green.
‘Oh my God! Are you sure?’
She knows I’m sure. She grabs hold of me, gives me a short hug, then dashes out from the kitchen, through the dining room, the living room and out our front door over to the Guinans’ to telephone the police.
It turned out he was dead all right. They drove an ambulance and police cars right up our alley. My mom made me stay home through it all, but Doug Zigenfus saw it and said Mr Harding was so stiff they couldn’t straighten him out to put him on the stretcher, so he was on his back with his knees and hands out in front of him as if he was still sitting in his car, driving up a steep hill or a wall; driving straight up to heaven, maybe.
The police came and asked me a lot of questions. They wanted to know what exact time I found him but I didn’t know; I don’t have a watch. They made me guess and I said about seven o’clock. They wanted to know why I went into the garage and I told them about seeing Mr Harding sitting in there alone and about thinking he might be drunk.
They even wanted to know what I was doing walking around the alley that early in the morning. I didn’t want to tell them I was taking things from trashcans because that might be stealing so I said I was looking at some of the porches my dad and I had built. That wasn’t a lie because I was doing that, too. I like looking at those porches; it makes me think I’m doing something like a grown person, even though Dad does most of the work.
Then they left us alone.
There was just a tiny bit in the Bulletin and the Ledger. The Inquirer didn’t even mention it. But the little paper, our Upper Darby paper, had a whole column on the first page, with a picture of Mr Harding dressed up in a suit, looking younger. They even mentioned my name as finding him. I was a kind of hero for several weeks there. Then Elizabeth Zane from down the street got run over by an automobile at the corner of Clover Lane and Copely. She was almost killed so she spent more than a month in the hospital. After that, everybody pretty much forgot about Mr Harding; but I didn’t.
It was then I really started thinking about being dead and what it was to die. It didn’t look as if Mr Harding had gone to hell even though he had committed suicide and was condemned. He just looked as if he’d swollen up and turned blue.
When school started this year I was still thinking about Mr Harding a lot. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I even dreamed about him and I hardly even knew Mr Harding. I cut his lawn a couple times for a dime but that’s all.
Sister Anastasia is our fifth-grade teacher. As I said, I hate school and one of the ways I get through some days is day-dreaming. I don’t do it on purpose. My mind just goes off on its own, dreaming, thinking about things. One morning, I’m thinking about Mr Harding during religion class. We have religion first thing and it’s the most boring of all because all we do is memorize parts of the Catechism. We don’t really talk about religion at all, like, What’s being alive all about? What’s it like to be dead? We’re only memorizing and I hate that.
We’re studying the seven capital sins, Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. I’m still not sure what covetousness and sloth are. Coveting is also part of two of the Ten Commandments. It has something to do with wanting something you can’t have, but how’s that different from Envy?
We’re all taking turns standing up and saying the answer to the Catechism question Sister Anastasia asks each of us. She asks each person the same question each time, although we all know what the question’s going to be. We have to stand up and wait while she asks that same dumb question. I sit in the first row and I’ve already answered, so I know I have time for myself; that’s when my mind takes off.
The desks we sit in have slanted tops and the seats are hooked to them with curved metal tubes. The slanted part opens and there’s a place inside where you can put your books. At the very top of the desk is a narrow,