It was a camera—a camera and one of them sticks that you explode flash-powder in for taking pictures indoors.

23

I jumped up and started for the house. About the first step I took, my foot caught in a root and I fell sprawling with the wind knocked out of me. For a minute or two, I didn’t even have enough breath to groan, and when I finally did manage to pick myself up, I couldn’t move very fast. So it was maybe all of five minutes before I got to the house, and found a window where I could hear and see.

Well, sir, it was a funny thing, a funny-terrible thing, a strange crazy thing. Because what caught my attention wasn’t what you’d have thought it would be at all. Not Rose, scared and dazed and wonderin’ what the heck had gone wrong. Not Lennie and Myra, smilin’ and spiteful and enjoyin’ theirselves. Not something that was in the room itself. Not somethin’ but nothing. The emptiness. The absence of things.

I’d maybe been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it. But this was the first time I’d seen what they really were. Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin’.Just pine-board walls locking in the emptiness. No pictures, no books—nothing to hook at or think about. Just the emptiness that was soakin’ in on me here.

And then suddenly it wasn’t here, it was everywhere, every place like this one. And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to.

There were the helpless little girls, cryin’ when their own daddies crawled into bed with ‘em. There were the men beating their wives, the women screamin’ for mercy. There were the kids wettin’ in the beds from fear and nervousness, and their mothers dosin’ ‘em with red pepper for punishment. There were the haggard faces, drained white from hookworm and blotched with scurvy. There was the near-starvation, the never-bein’-full, the debts that always outrun the credits. There was the how-we-gonna-eat, how-we-gonna-sheep, how-we-gonna-cover-our-poor-bare-asses thinkin’. The kind of thinkin’ that when you ain’t doing nothing else but that, why you’re better off dead. Because that’s the emptiness thinkin’ and you’re already dead inside, and all you’ll do is spread the stink and the terror, the weepin’ and wailin’, the torture, the starvation, the shame of your deadness. Your emptiness.

I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn’t seem at all bad by comparison. Yea, verily, it was indeed merciful and wonderful of Him. And it was up to me to stop brooding, and to pay attention to what was going on right here and now.

So I made an extra hard try, rubbing my eyes and shaking myself, and finally I managed to.

“—a goddam liar!” Rose was yelling. “I didn’t say any such of a goddam thing!”