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things that might get caught in the lawnmower. He couldn't bend down to get them himself, but he'd point them out to me, so I could pick them up. And then when I started to mow, sometimes he'd stand at the edge of the place I was cutting, and every now and then he'd try to shout over the noise of the mower, trying to tell me something. He'd point out a spot I missed, or he'd yell at me to cut the yard crossways instead of up and down, or he'd yell at me to hurry up because he thought it was going to rain. These days he mostly just gives me a ride, since I do mostly janitor work there now, and Pete don't care much for going inside the nursing home. He's got a good heart, and it really gets him down to go inside and to see what a fix so many of the folks are in. I'd be lying if I said it didn't get me down too. 5 I remember one day when I was playing with W.D., when I started teasing him and I let it get out of hand. He was about three years old then. We'd been rolling a ball across the floor, back and forth, and then one time I slipped it up under my shirt and played like it was lost. He started looking for it, and he couldn't figure it out, and then after a while he got upset and started to cry. Susan had the ironing board set up in the same room, and she seen what I had done, and at first she smiled at it, but then when W.D. thought his ball was lost and started to cry, she stopped ironing and looked at me and cocked her head sideways. Now if anybody was to hurt W.D., any way at all, they'd answer to me. Sometimes I'd get so worried about him, it wasn't natural. I 32 used to stand over his bed and watch him sleep, making sure he was still breathing. But that day, instead of saying I was sorry and handing the ball back, I tried to cover it up by acting like I was trying to teach W.D. a lesson. Instead of owning up to playing a little trick that turned mean, I ended up telling Susan a lie about how I was letting the baby see that you can't get everything you want all the time. She didn't pay me the least bit of attention. She said, "Ellis Burt, you give that baby his ball back right this minute." I took the ball out of my shirt—a hard rubber ball—and I flipped it sideways at W.D. At least I meant to flip it, but I got too much of my arm into it, and I guess you could say I slung it, like a child might have done, and it hit him slap on his left eye, and he fell back howling. Susan grabbed him up and took him into the kitchen and put a cold washrag on his eye. And I followed them in there, said I was sorry and I didn't mean to do that, but W.D. was screaming and Susan had cut me dead, and if I reached out to try to touch W.D.'s face, she'd twist him away so I couldn't reach him, and if I tried to put my arm around her, she swung a mean elbow at me. I stepped back and watched her tend to his eye. I had learned a long time ago that you can almost never talk yourself out of a situation. On the other hand, if you try it, you can get yourself in a whole lot more trouble real easy. And so I finally went on about my business like always,except I done some things I didn't usually do. Without saying anything about it, I washed the supper dishes, and when it come time to go to sleep, I brought Susan a big glass of ice water to put by the bed. She always wanted one, since she got thirsty in the night, and when we first got married I done it for her, but I had stopped. And then the next day I 33...
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