“We’ll soon know!” Durkin said.
Durkin bent swiftly, and without glancing at the children, picked up the house, and raised it until the ground floor windows were on a level with his eyes.
He stared in.
Children do not self-consciously engage in gruesome pranks—even when they hate. Emotional impulses which later in life are filtered through reason and become social attitudes remain in children appallingly direct.
Children are thus exposed to adult censure for acts which they would never dream of performing in a frame of reference removed from the playground and tied in with their socially-consolidated attitudes of respect toward home, school, and parents.
Children chalk up sidewalks, ring doorbells and throw stones at windows and are almost instantly sorry. But Durkin knew nothing of that. He only saw himself sitting on a red-hot stove, his long legs drawn up grasshopper fashion on both sides of his lank body.
What was even more shocking, he saw himself as a fiend incarnate. The children had done an astonishingly ingenious job of making a devil out of him by painting him in the darkest colors imaginable.
In fact, they had painted him black. The ill-fitting store suit had been removed, and with the aid of Emily’s watercolor set, and Robert’s clay modeling set he had been made to resemble a demon being roasted over a spit.
Utterly fiendish was his charcoal-dark aspect of face and limb. Horns sprouted from his temples, and a long, forked tail, ash-gray in hue, coiled down over the stove like some evil brand snatched from the burning.
There were tiny gleaming coals in the stove fashioned of red isinglass. The stove had gone with the house, but by the matchless artistry of childhood something new had been added, and as Durkin stared all of the color drained from his face.
He was sitting directly over the coals, exposed to the cruelly searing blast in every part of his anatomy. For an instant the illusion of searing heat was so real that he responded psychosomatically. His nostrils dilated with the odor of burning flesh, and his nerve-roots shrieked as if irradiated by intolerable pain.
Then reality came sweeping back. Instead of an imaginary projection of himself he saw only a ridiculous wooden doll sprawled akimbo on a toy stove.
Shaking with rage, Durkin set the house down, swung about, and gripped his stepson savagely by the wrist.
“Just pretending, were you?” he muttered. “Just waiting for me to come out here, and pat you on the back.”
Robert tried to break free. Sick with fear, he tugged and twisted, but Durkin had stronger fingers than a demon, and a deeper understanding of how a frightened boy could make a fool of a man by using his smallness as a cloak.
“You too, Emily,” Durkin said. “Come here. I want to have a long, fatherly talk with you.”
Emily turned and cast a frantic glance of appeal toward the kitchen door. When her mother did not appear she started backing away from her stepfather across the yard.
Without releasing her brother, Durkin circled around in back of her. “Not so fast, brat!” he warned. “You and Robbie play house in a mighty interesting way. Suppose you tell me more about it.”
“Let me go!” Robert pleaded. “We just took one of the dolls and made a Halloween coal man out of him.”
“A coal man, eh?” Durkin sneered. “That’s sure odd. You must have forgotten it’s not Halloween?”
“It doesn’t have to be Halloween!” Robert protested.
“Doesn’t it? I suppose not. You could turn on your own father just as well on Thanksgiving day. That’s how grateful you are.”
Emily spoke up defiantly then. “You’re not Robbie’s father,” she said. “You never could be.”
“I tried my best to be a good father to Robbie,” Durkin said, lowering his voice in mock humility. “You can’t claim I didn’t try. But there comes a time when discipline’s needed. No punishment’s severe enough for a boy who’d like to see his own father roasted like a chestnut in a red-hot fire.”
A sudden, terrible anger flared in his eyes. “No punishment’s bad enough. But a strong birch switch laid on heavy may do some good.”
He stared at Emily, his neck arched in chicken-hawk fashion. “I can’t punish you the way I’m going to punish Robbie,” he said. “You’re too young—just a baby. But when a baby does wrong you’ve got to be stern. That’s kindness.”
Durkin bent abruptly, gripped his stepdaughter by the elbow, and lifted her to her feet. “A few hours without your supper in the dark—”
“Mommy!” Emily shrieked. “Mommy, Mommy!”
The kitchen door flew open, and Helen Durkin came running out of the house, her eyes wide with fright. She went up to her husband, and started tugging at his wrists.
“Let them go!” she cried. “Robbie hasn’t done anything. I was watching every minute.”
“He hasn’t, eh?” Durkin glared at her. “He’d like to see me hanging from a rafter. Give him a piece of rope, and he’d hang me in effigy.”
“He wouldn’t. Why do you say a thing like that? You must be out of your mind, Will Durkin!”
“He would, I tell you. He’s already done something just as bad. He’s got to learn respect, and I’m going to give him the thrashing of his life.”
“Will Durkin, you let them go. Do you hear? You’ve no right—”
Surprisingly Durkin complied. He released both children, and turned his full fury on his wife.
“I’m going upstairs and get a birch switch,” he said. “You’d better see that Robbie stays right here in the yard. I’ll hold you responsible. If he isn’t here when I come back you can pack your things and get out. No right to punish my own son. We’ll see—”
His eyes narrowed in relentless hate, Durkin swung about and went striding toward the house. Despite his rage he experienced a fierce, secret gratification in knowing he’d had the foresight to cut and trim a stout birch switch well in advance.
Perhaps it was intended
