Free False Entry by Hortense Calisher Page B

of the world’s dust, which people employ once a shock is over, already becoming absorbed in the fiber, an already known quantity in the future catechism of days.
    That night, also, I was to have my first sight of feeling gurgled up from a heart that does not pause to know it has it, but I was too young to recognize this, or value it for the great sight it is. Later on I would be still young enough to recognize it and despise it. Only much later would I come to hunt it for myself, for its intercession, as I do now.
    We were in the lumber-room of the store, with no other entry but the one through which we had come. Opposite this, a door in the wall had been nailed up by means of two bars of hewn wood, crisscrossed over the lock. Semple’s store had been let into the lower story of one of those two-decker wooden houses of the eighties, loaf-shaped, topped with a single border of crenellation, that often line the main streets of small towns here even now, receding behind their gouged fronts like faded backdrops of the vaudeville period to which they belong. The store proper lay on the other side of the nailed door, a jumble too, as I had once or twice glimpsed it, but one of cash-register brightness, filled with the unmellowed, turpentine smells of all the brisk hardware of the hour.
    Here, on the other side, all the unsalable had been put to molder. One corner held a wardrobe big as a stall, made of walnut—in the South the poor man’s wedding wood, the rich man’s ordinary. In one of its closed panels, long as a coffin lid, the lion’s mane of the burl still spumed under the dust. Elsewhere, harness hung to rot, over bladder-shapes of leather and iron and shadow, in a quiet brown of accumulation, the color of the cul-de-sac.
    But in the center of the room there was a ring of chairs, twelve chairs closing a circle with exemplary neatness. And in the center of these, on one of those bent-bamboo stands which women use to set a choice plant in the sun or a nightlamp in a window, a small, clean book lay, a startle of white that held the chairs, the room. I moved toward it.
    “Watch how you touch it!” came Johnny’s voice from behind. “They know when you touch it.”
    I leaned forward on tiptoe. It was a pamphlet rather than a book. Four long pins had been driven into it, and from these white thread had been suspended, up to down, left to right, forming a hairline cross.
    “Who?” I whispered. “You were going to tell me.”
    He turned to the wardrobe and took something out, holding it folded on his arm. “Ain’t you figured that out yet?” Then he drew the thing over his head, a pointed white hood that blanked him to the shoulders, all but the pencil-holes for the eyes.
    “Don’t!” I said, recoiling. A chair fell over, behind me.
    “Is that what they had on?” I said. “Why we couldn’t see them? The men in the cars?”
    “Ah-hah.” His voice came blunted as a ghost’s. “Better put them back their chair.”
    “What is it?” I said, not moving. “What’s that thing for?” But deep in the acquisitive blood that learns to course with the climate it inhabits, I already knew. No one had ever breathed a word to me here of their open secret, but I breathed their oblique air. And I understood their need, being one of those born to form a hood of his own, one that would keep me a thousand times more secret than they. I looked at theirs, and felt of my cheek, that I had wanted to cover as I crouched in the backs. This was the white hood they used here, to cover the white face.
    He drew the hood off. “It’s all there,” he said softly. “In the book there.”
    “What is?”
    “Everything. The names,” he said softly, urgently, not looking at me, so that I guessed that he had brought me here, not for myself, but for a purpose of his own. It did not occur to me that he took it for granted that I knew who “they” were in general, as the ant must assume that the nest is the organism of the world. He