City and town life -- Fiction; Short stories, American
I dunno if you'll know what I mean by that name for him. Some men are
just men, like they thought God made them just for the pleasure of
making them. And some men are flying around like they wanted to prove
that the Almighty didn't make a mistake when He created them. But there
are some men that just live like God hadn't made them so much as that
they're a piece of Him, and they haven't forgotten it and they feel
kindly toward all the other pieces. Well, this man was one of the
Brother-men. I knew it the minute I saw him.
By the time he came in the car, moving leisurely and like getting a seat
wasn't so interesting as most other things, there wasn't a seat left,
excepting only the turned one in front of the little chap asleep. The
man looked around idle for a minute and see that they wasn't cloak or
valise keeping that seat, and he sat down and opened the book he'd had
his finger in the place all the time, and allowed to read.
There's consid'rable switching to do at the Junction, time we get
started; and the jolts and bounces did just exactly what I thought they
would do--woke the little chap up. From before the train started he
begun stirring and whimpering--that way a baby does when it wants
nothing in the world but a hand to be laid on it. Isn't it as if its
mother's hand was a kind of healing that big folks forget about needing?
By the time the train was out on the road in earnest, the little chap,
he was in earnest, too. And he just what-you-might-say yelled. But no
mother came. They wasn't a mother's hand with big red and blue rings on
three fingers to lay on the little boy's back. And there wasn't a mother
of him anywhere's in sight.
In a minute or two the Brother-man looked up. He hadn't seemed to see
the baby before or to sense that he _was_ a baby. And he looked at him
crying and he laid his book down and he looked all around him,
perplexish, and then he looked over to me that was looking at him
perplexish, too. And being he was a man and I wasn't, I got right up and
went round there and picked the little chap up in my arms and sat down
with him.
"His ma went out of the car somewheres," I explained it.
He had lifted his hat and jumped up, polite as if he was the one I'd
picked up. And he stood looking down at me.
"I wonder if I couldn't fetch her," he says--and his voice was one of
the voices that most says an idea all alone. I mean you'd most have
known what he meant if he'd just spoke along without using any
words--oh, well, I dunno if that sounds like anything, but I guess you
know the kind I mean. The Novel-and-Poem Man's stories are the same
kind, being they say so much that never does get set up in type.
The baby didn't stop crying at all--seems as though your hands don't
have the right healing unless--unless--well, it didn't stop nor even
halt. And so I says, hesitating, I says: "You wouldn't know her," I
says. "I been watching her. I could find her better--if so be you
wouldn't mind taking the baby."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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