The Long Walk Home

I can’t remember when I started home from Jim’s that late October night, but I told myself I wouldn’t be scared even though the single, high incandescent streetlight swayed wildly in the wind, throwing eerie shadows through the tall buckeye branches to the glazed brick sidewalk below. After all, I was ten now.

I stared as I passed the white frame house across the intersection where some older girls stayed and remembered all the men Jim and I had watched going in and out of it from his front porch in the deep shadows of the summer evenings. And then I spied the old widow Moss’s next door to it, and peered into the shade of her porch where she would come out to swing slowly and walk around the front with a lady I didn’t know.

Then I saw the dusky brown house next door that was always vacant, with a “for sale” sign in its yard, next to Nicotine Alley (that’s what the high school guys called it because it was the first place they would get to out of sight of the school on the hill, where they could light up). This was the darkest part of the block, and I could barely see my shoes when I looked down. I peered down the alley and thought for a minute something moved in the inky blackness--no, just a shadow, I thought.

Skipping across the alley as silently as I could, I glanced up at Jim’s dad’s office right beside me, and thought of the painted metal stools and baskets and medical cabinets--and especially the skeleton Jim showed me once when we sneaked in the side door one afternoon. The front window was dark, but its drapes seemed to undulate behind the glass, and where they met I could have sworn a dark crack appeared. I shivered and stepped quickly past.

On the other side of the street a light was still on in Larry Bond’s house. His dad was a tree surgeon and always wore undershirts and boots and parked his big truck out in front. I never played much with Larry, though; his mom was a birdlike woman with a high, crackling voice/and she never seemed to let him do anything fun.

Miss Plum lived upstairs in the chocolate brick apartment building across from the Central School playground. She was probably reading the ‘Declaration of Independence” somewhere in her room right now. And across the street on my side I passed the columns of the Christian Science Church. I stepped down the high curb into Warren Street, remembering how I wrecked my bicycle flying off of it a few weeks before, and crossed Kauffman/Walk 3 over to the towering First Presbyterian Church with its pointed entrances.

But then I nearly stopped. There was a dark side walkway between First Presbyterian and the high wall of the Smith-Field Funeral Home property on the far side which I wouldn’t dream of going back into in the dark. I didn’t even dare look aside as I flew past it, though in the daytime I would often scramble up on top of the wide flat stone wall and run along its whole length without a care.

But at night--this night especially--I walked close to the wall, keeping my head crouched down below it, not even looking at Stultz-Briggs funeral home, the red, turreted mansion above, with its huge, black-framed, curtained windows and faded rose lights dimly glowing within. I crept on to Jefferson Street.

Then I raced full tilt across to Krogers’ and flew through the dark empty parking lot to my own side alley, where I expected a police car to stop and ask me where I had been and where I was going, past the back of the Elks with its garbage cans, beer boxes, and fire escape (I loved to mount its four stories to the roof for a beautiful view of the whole city), glancing down the pitch-dark space behind the building to the junkpile of broken toilet stools, sinks, and pipes that Metzger’s Plumbing threw out behind their store, where I had seen rats crawling in and out of once.

Finally I reached my own back door and peeked in quietly to see if anybody was in the rear of the house waiting for me.

"Woof!" the loud bark broke the stillness behind me, and I jumped around.

“Tuffy!” I cried. “Doggone it, are you still out?”

He wriggled from under the outside swing and pranced up to me, wagging his tail.

“Let’s get you inside, boy,” I said. “You big scaredy-cat, I bet you were scared to death, weren’t you? Don’t you know there’s nothing to be afraid of?”