Framed through the hall door Will saw the only theater he cared for now, the familiar stage where sat his father (home already! he and Jim must have run the long way round!) holding a book but reading the empty spaces. In a chair by the fire mother knitted and hummed like a tea-kettle.
He wanted to be near and not near them, he saw them close, he saw them far. Suddenly they were awfully small in too large a room in too big a town and much too huge a world. In this unlocked place they seemed at the mercy of anything that might break in from the night.
Including me, Will thought. Including me.
Suddenly he loved them more for their smallness than he ever had when they seemed tall.
His mother's fingers twitched, her mouth counted, the happiest woman he had ever seen. He remembered a greenhouse on a winter day, pushing aside thick jungle leaves to find a creamy pink hothouse rose poised alone in the wilderness. That was mother, smelling like fresh milk, happy, to herself, in this room.
Happy? But how and why? Here, a few feet off, was the janitor, the library man, the stranger, his uniform gone, but his face still the face of a man happier at night alone in the deep marble vaults, whispering his broom in the drafty corridors.
Will watched, wondering why this woman was so happy and this man so sad.
His father stared deep in the fire, one hand relaxed. Half cupped in that hand lay a crumpled paper ball.
Will blinked.
He remembered the wind blowing the pale handbill skittering in the trees. Now the same color paper lay crushed, its rococo type hidden, in his father's fingers.
"Hey!"
Will stepped into the parlor.
Immediately Mom opened a smile that was like lighting a second fire.
Dad, stricken, looked dismayed, as if caught in a criminal act.
Will wanted to say, "Hey, what'd you think of the handbill ...?"
But Dad was cramming the handbill deep in the chair upholstery.
And mother was leafing the library books.
"Oh, these are fine, Willy!"
So Will just stood with Cooger and Dark on his tongue and said:
"Boy, the wind really flew us home. Streets full of paper blowing."
Dad did not flinch at this.
"Anything new, Dad?"
Dad's hand still lay tucked in the side of the chair. He lifted a gray, slightly worried, very tired gaze to his son:
"Stone lion blew off the library steps. Prowling the town now, looking for Christians. Won't find any. Got the only one in captivity here, and she's a good cook."
"Bosh," said Mom.
Walking upstairs, Will heard what he half expected to hear.
A soft fluming sigh as something fresh was tossed on the fire. In his mind, he saw Dad standing at the hearth looking down as the paper crinkled to ash:
"... COOGER ... DARK ... CARNIVAL ... WITCH ... WONDERS ..."
He wanted to go back down and stand with Dad, hands out, to be warmed by the fire.
Instead he went slowly up to shut the door of his room.