be here in the old familiar routine. When school was over maybe he could get away, away from the town and people he did not belong with. But where … where and with whom did he belong?
Gaylord moved to the rail; his hands resting on it, he gazed into a bed of zinnias. Their blossoms stood straight and proud; their petals coarse and red as flowing blood, their centers deep and mysterious, their leaves long and pointed as knives. He wondered who had planted them and how they had survived in the grass-infested earth. He watched a lightning bug moving silently along the rim of darkness, giving a twinkle made possible by some unseen force, and he felt that he was, himself, caught by forces greater than he, pushed and pulled by incomprehensible currents.
A shrill whistle sounded and a freight train creaked and shook down the tracks that lay beyond the graveled street he had parked on. The depot, surrounded by trees and indifferent shrubbery, was plain in his mind. Several lighted street lamps fronted the orange-colored edifice and as he thought of it he remembered the first time he had waited there for a favorite aunt to arrive. He remembered saying to her: "The railroad tracks cut Cotton in two parts, the north and the south. The south side's the old part of town. Nobody likes it. It's got the auditorium and the post office. But the best side is the north. It has new buildings and the nicest homes."
And his aunt had answered, "And honey, I bet your daddy built his house on the north side, didn't he?"
And he had replied, "How did you know?"
"I just know your daddy," she had answered.
"I don't like it here … I wish we lived in a big city. I hate small towns."
"You do?" Her face had tensed, but she went on, "Honey, you won't have to live here all your life. When you get to be a man you can go any place you want to. And after you've seen large cities, you might not think this little town so bad after all. Large cities are lonely and very cold to strangers sometimes."
That had happened a long time ago … a million years … and he was still here. Nothing had changed. A larger city couldn't have been any colder than this small town. This clannish place with its bullies and farmers. This infested burg he hated because no one
