The Proud and the Free by Howard Fast Page B

like of such a boy as you.
    Well, let me be, then. Let me be as I am. I ain’t asking to be no different, so let me be.
    You’re a creature, not a boy, she said.
    Well, you can go to the devil and be damned then, calling me a creature!
    We were outside the manse, and she stopped and turned to me, wide-eyed and horrified.
    Jamie Stuart!
    What you asked for you got.
    Then I’ll leave you alone to your dirt and your nasty mind. You’re a miserable little boy!
    And she stormed into the house and left me standing outside alone, and there I stood, first on one foot and then on the other, and then on both feet, but unable to move, unable to go and unable to remain – in that wholly ambivalent condition that only a boy of fifteen, deeply and wholly in love for the first time in his life, can experience. And there I remained until Pastor Bracken came along on his way into the house, cocked an eye at me, prepared to pass on and then paused to question.
    Waiting for someone? he wanted to know.
    Nope.
    You’re the Stuart boy, aren’t you?
    Uh-huh.
    Tumbrill’s apprentice.
    I nodded, feeling shame cloak me and run all over me. Evidently, he sensed what was going through my mind, and in any case there was visual evidence in the way in which my toes crawled for cover into my broken shoes, the way in which my elbows crawled from their holes, my knees from the gaps in my breeches. But mostly my toes, writhing over each other like terrified snakes, for what could be more incongruous or humiliating than a cobbler’s apprentice shod as badly as I?
    Why don’t you come in, he said, and meet my daughter?
    I know her, I answered, staring at my toes as I manipulated them.
    Oh.
    She don’t like me, I said.
    No? Well, maybe she could learn. That happens, Jamie Stuart. People start out disliking each other fit to tie a cat, and then they change. So why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea with us? How about that now? Won’t you come in? Come along now, won’t you, Jamie Stuart?
    And Jacob Bracken put his arm through mine and took me into his house with him, and of this I dreamed and of other things as well. How he made Molly my teacher, I dreamed; for he gave me a book to read and I pretended to read it. Yes, one fine day this happened, as I sat with them in their unbelievable kindness, and the man who wrote that book was a poet called Milton. And there in it was a picture of the splendid and awful turmoil of heaven and hell, so that my very heart ached to know what it meant.
    Read it aloud, Jamie, said Pastor Bracken.
    My head was bent and I would not raise it.
    What is into the boy? asked Pastor Bracken. Molly, what is into the boy, do you suppose?
    Leave him alone, she answered, God bless her. Then and there, I said to myself, God bless her for her kindness, for she is the best and sweetest lass in all the world.
    Jamie! cried Pastor Bracken then, in the thunderous voice he used on a Sunday morning in the pulpit. Jamie! he cried.
    And I raised up my head all covered with tears, and answered that I was as ignorant as a pup just whelped, and not a word of the English language could I read or write, and here I was, fifteen years and better.
    So Molly taught me, and I dreamed of her teaching me. I dreamed of the ABC as I, a big gawking lad, learned it out of a hornbook, and I dreamed of the first little verses I put together. But such is the magic of words that I dreamed also of the first book of depth and beauty that I was able to make out for myself, and how eventually I lay before Pastor Bracken’s fire, reading like a cat gone mad in the catnip, first from one book and then from another, all unconcerned with the beating these late hours away would earn me when I returned to the shop.
    So I dreamed of this and that, of one thing and another, of my meeting Molly Bracken, of seeing her, of learning from her, of defending her once from a mad dog, holding the dog at arm’s length, both my