Free Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright Page A

mistake. I told him there were men working on the tracks by Trestle Bridge, and they would be along soon, and then he would find himself in serious trouble. The tramp could see I was lying and he may have sensed the beginning of my fear. Then he said something like this.
    “Now, Missus, you’re telling us a fib and nice ladies like you shouldn’t tell fibs. There are no men working on that bridge this afternoon. Section men don’t work on Saturday afternoons. Everybody gets a little holiday on Saturday afternoons, even section men. We know that, don’t we, Donny? Me and Donny live on the tracks, Missus. We been on railway tracks all over this country and in the United States of America too.”
    I had started forward again, but suddenly he sprang ahead of me and blocked my way. He was one of those loose-jointed men who are perhaps remembered in country towns for nothing more than step-dancing. I must have said something like, “What do you think you’re doing?” and then he said this. I remember these words.
    “You live alone, don’t you, Missus? No man around? Nobody to chop your wood or warm your little feet in bed. Oh my, what a shame!”
    His words unsettled me, and I’m sure it was then that I knew these men intended to harm me. Then the tramp said, “You’re a good-looking woman and I’ll bet you could use a good ____ing.” At that word I screamed, and I remember that at the edge of the pine woods, several small black-and-yellow birds rushed forth from the grass and rose into the air. The tramp seized my wrists. “Come along now, Missus. I just want to give you a little kiss. I haven’t had a kiss in donkey’s years.” Donkey’s years! Yes, he used that expression. And so began my struggle. He was all sharp and flinty, all bones and edges or so it seemed. I remember the sour tobacco stink from his mouth and the unwashed smell of his overalls. A reeking skeleton of a man with a wide mouth.
    We swayed in the grass by the side of the tracks. “Now, Missus, now, Missus, you’ll like it, you’ll see.” A kind of mad, skipping song over and over. So we shuffled around in the grass, and the tramp began to laugh and holding me at arm’s-length he twisted me around. He was singing a foolish song. “Have you every been into an Irishman’s shanty? Where money is scarce, but whisky’s a-plenty.” It was all this mad circling and through the turns I could see the boy sitting on the tracks, watching us. The tramp’s face had reddened with his exertions and he had somehow managed to remove his coat and fling it into the grass.
    Then I fell and he covered me with himself. There was something sharp against my cheek from one of his pockets. A pencil maybe or the stem of a pipe. The terrible stink of him and his hand was beneath my dress, tearing at my underclothes. Ripping them away from me. I was dizzy from all that turning and sick with the notion of what was happening. I said to the tramp, “You musn’t do this to me. You musn’t harm me like this.” But he was only desperate and obscene. “Oh yes, Missus. Yes, Missus. I want to ____ you so bad. I do. You’ll like it, Missus. You’ll like it.” His words were something like that. Then I thought this. A terrible thing is going to happen and I can do nothing about it. It will be an ordeal but I do not think they will kill me. They are not murdering men. They will run away as soon as thisis over. My eyes were closed and I shuddered with the pain of his entrance into my body.
    Then the frantic thrusting inside me. I counted nine, ten, perhaps a dozen before he spent himself. And all the while I was thinking this. I was thinking how suddenly a life can become misshapen, divided brutally into before and after a dire event. So it must be with all who endure calamity: those who must remember the day of the motor car accident, the afternoon the child fell through the ice, the winter night’s blaze that awakened the dreamers.
    The tramp was now quiet. I