Poorhouse Fair by John Updike

the nameplates on the porch chairs.
    "What?" Conner had difficulty understanding the excited enunciation of this man.
    "Probably it'll be the only goddam thing to come to the fair today, with the storm," Gregg went on, nearly crazy with his own boldness in the face of the fact of Conner's being right there. "If I could catch it," he cried, "I'd wring its f.ing neck."
    "If a group of children were to find the animal," Hook spoke out of his memories, "they would make uncommon sport of him."
    The idea sickened Conner, children soaking the dying animal with kerosene. He lacked most men's tolerance for cruelty, their ability to blur and forget rumors of it. He wondered if Gregg were ugly enough to make good his insane threat. Perhaps he was; a net of dark wrinkles had been thrown across his face, and his features seemed bright things caught in this net. Conner asked him, "Why would you harm the animal?"
    Gregg was taken aback. In tides as variable as those of astrological influence, sense and caution flowed in and out of him; comparatively lucid, he realized he was facing the tyrant of the place and had been saying whatever came first to his tongue. Now Conner had taken him up, ready with a trap. "Why because," he answered, inspired, "it spreads disease."
    Conner blinked; this was true.
    "Among chickens," Hook interceded, "I've seen the fever brought into the pen by a fox spread so there weren't a half dozen standing by morning."
    "Yes, and to humans too," Gregg went on, cleverly sensing he had found a sore spot of Conner's. "Don't they carry typhoid? If Alice sees it, sure as s. she'll let the stinking thing play around in the kitchen." His eyes glinted, and he did a dance step, unable to keep his feet from jubilating.
    The cat had not gone far, once it felt unpursued. While the men talked, it returned, having smelled the parcel Gregg had laid behind the porch pillar. Alice had not tied the parcel, so it had unfolded of itself. The scraps--pork, minced--smelled neutrally to the cat; he recognized them as life-stuff, unconnected with pleasure. Dutifully he nosed the chunks, searching for lean; his bowed grave head half-lost in the collar of upstanding orange paper.
    "Look there," Gregg cried softly.
    As the three men watched, the tomcat, jiggling his head, got the smallest piece between his teeth, on the side where they were not smashed. But the arc his jaw could make was too small for chewing, and the piece dropped back among the others. The thin yellow tail swished twice. For a moment he licked a hump of gray fat, then lost interest wholly, looked up, saw the men, bolted off the porch, and hobbled around the house into the shade.
    "Who put the meat there?" Conner asked.
    "I brought a little up from the kitchen," Gregg admitted, thinking that now he was in for it.
    Conner realized how badly he had misjudged the man; the culpability of the distrust he bore these powerless old people, whom complete material deprivation had not deprived of the capacity for such acts of kindness, was borne upon him. He wished there were some feasible way of abasing himself before Gregg, and he tried to compress all the affection and humility he felt into the gentle-spoken, "I'm afraid it's beyond help."
    Relieved to hear in the tone that he would not be punished for trespassing into the kitchen, Gregg did not comprehend the point of Conner's words.
     
    BUDDY, feeling jilted--especially so when, less than an hour after Conner left, sunlight drained it seemed forever from the windows of the cupola--became unable to bear his solitude, and started downstairs, in Conner's cold tracks. The twin had an unspoken terror of being alone, terror so keen that, abandoned, he unwillingly animated dead things --the green steel cabinets, the buried piano, the upright objects on Conner's desk top. These summoned presences intimidated him; he expected at every moment the window to smack its lips and the water cooler to gurgle uproariously. The stairs themselves had a