PR SPECTES University Of Michigan Literary Magazine VOLUME V., NyMBER 1 Supplement to THE MICHIGAN DAILY NOVEMBER, 1941 CERTAIN HIDDEN THINGS by Jay McCormicrk T HE CAPTAIN and aunt Del were talking in the next room and it was about me because every once in a while I heard one of them say Jim or Jimmie depending on whe- ther it was the captain or aunt Del who said it. For maybe a half hour they had kept their voices low so that all I heard was a deep rumble I could feel through the floor too or the extra breath wheez- ing at either end of what my aunt said. But they started to get sore and their voices. got louder and I guess they fig- yred when you are five years old you go to sleep and don't lie there crying a little and thinking about your mother being dead, so I could hear most of what they were saying. Aunt Del was not married. She taught school and lived in an apartment close to the schoolfwhere I would go next fall. Her apartment was nice, it looked like a picture in a magazine, with all the things in the right place, and that was the way aunt Del looked too, but even if she was a teacher and dad just a lake captain we had way more books in our house than she had, and we read ours so they were around in different places lying open, not always in the bookcase, and in our holse no matter how a chair looked if you sat in it you could squirm down and hunch up your shoulders and feel warm and pretend the chair was a fort or a little boat until yos got reading a book and all the pretend was in your_ head and in the book. We had a fire- place too, and every fall the captain brought two or three cords of birch wood from Alpena and a truck brought it up from Wyandotte and piled it in our back yard and we climbed on it and peeled the rough dirty bark off, then the clean smooth white bark and the layers of red and the dark spots made it look like playr piano rolls and once I tried to play some on the piano next door, and winters when the captain was home off the lakes we sat in front of the fire and sometimes my mother is there and sometimes it is just the captain and me, none of us talking, only the soft snap of fire and the occasional turn of a page. My mother taught me how to read, and once I can remember wading at a beach with her in a funny bathing suit and there were times when someone soft and cool and nice smelling came to my room at night when they had been away and talked to ne quietly, holding me in her arms and letting my face rub against the fur collar of her coat, and then sud- denly there is a doctor an my aunt Del crying but trying never to let me see, telling me stories and ordering me around or sending me out to play with the kids who seemed strange and afraid of me, and dad, the captain with a look in his face that I did not understand until they took me into the room and I saw the flowers on the bed and her looking a way I cannot remember, but eyes shut and perfectly still, no response for me when I touched her face. I was not supposed to know what all this meant so I could not cry until I was alone, and I didn't, but some of it must have been in my face like the captain's, because aunt Del came to me crying and said "Cry, Jimmie, go ahead and cry" which made it harder not to, but the captain didn't so neither did I except just a little at the funeral when Mr. Lloyd dropped the pieces of dirt into the place they put her and said "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." That is all I remember of my mother. She was pretty, the captain has told me so, and I have a picture of her wearing a fox neckpiece and a big hat, but I can remember only sitting beside her on the davenport as she read to me and pointing now and then to a word and asking what it meant. Only this and hanging onto the skirt of her bathing ing upon what they decided there in the next room. I was afraid, so afraid that I shivered and held my breath as long as I could in order not to miss anything they said because of the whistling in my, ears. Once I climbed from under the covers and knelt on my bed and said "Now I lay me down to sleep" over twice because I wanted to be with the captain. Then I thought about my mother being in Heaven now and it made me self- conscious to think of her hearing me with me," the captain broke in, and I could tell by his voice that he was point- ing his finger at her, shoving his jaw out 'he way he did just a few times wl r I saw him being a captain and noo taking any back talk about it. When I graduated into the pulp magazines I saw the same stern gesture under the caption "You" or "Are You?" to adver- tise correspondence courses, but there was a difference and even at the war birds stage I could tell it, because the captain was an easy going man, and most of the time he gave no sign that he was boss, so when he did he was mad and when he was mad his eyes were cold black and behind the pointing finger he was a very big man. . , "I won't have him babied," he said, "I won't have him grow up with a wo- man teaching him the things a man should teach him. Eight months out of the year he'd be alone with you, and I don't care how smart you are nor how much you learned at college about sci- entific child care, you'd spoil any kid who lived with you. If you want kids, why the hell don't you-" then he stop- ped suddenly. "I'm sorry, Del," he said, and he wasn't mad now. I was afraid because' they weren't talking, and the captain would be sorry and he might try to make it up to aunt Del by letting her have her way. But he started to talk again. "Look Del," he said, "I need the kid with me. It isn't only what's good for him, but me, how do you think I feel? I know you want the same thing for him that I want, but Del, look at it this way, I know that he needs me, and I know I need him. If it doesn't work out, if he gets sick o' he's lonesome or I see I'm wrong, I'll send him to you, I won't be Epig headed. But until I find out I'm wrong, I'm going to keep him with me. I hate to hurt you Del, but you can't have him." "You're being selfish, Jim," aunt Del said. "You say you're taking him on that boat for his own good, but you know perfectly well he'd be better off here. It's only for your sake you're doing this, for yourself because you don't think you can face it alone now. You're too weak to do what's right. You were a drinking man before you got married, Jim Flan- agan, and you'll be a drinking man again. But remember this, maybe now I can't stop you from taking Jimmie away, but if I hear that you're drinking heavy again, I'll go to.court and take him away from you." "You'll do no such thing, Del," the captain said. He was sort of laughing at her as though he liked her guts. "You're not the kind of a woman who goes to court about things. If you can't get what you want, no matter how mad it makes you you won't take any help. We're both of us used to getting our own way, but right now you're licked, Del." "Licked?" aunt Del said, as if she was going to get madder. She didn't say anything for a minute, then her voice was different, softer. "Licked," she said again. "Yes, I guess I am." "Jim'11 have to go to school next fall," the captain said, "I'll brin him to you then. Youre a good woman, Del." "Take good care of him. Tell him goodby from his aunt Del," she said. (Continued on Page Two) suit and the smell of her when she came in at night. The rest of 'her is made up or pieced together and added to these. I had been lying awake thinking about her, crying now and then because I felt sorry for myself, a poor little boy with- out a mother just the way some of them in the books were, but it wasn't until I realized what the captain and aunt Del were arguing about that I got scared or really had the thing hit me. They were mad at each other because both of them wanted to take care of me. I was suddenly something that people were bitter over, a cause of anger, and I saw first and frightened the future, the thing, a fork in the road that I could not now. I saw too that it was a double thing, a fork in the road,t hat I could be with aunt Del or the captain depend- pray up there so I got back under the covers and listened. He said "Del, I'm taking him with me, there's no two ways about it. He's a fun- ny kid, don't think he doesn't know just because he doesn't bawl. I'm taking him away from here, I don't want him griev- ing around the house here, he'll be bet- ter off on the boat." "Jim," aunt Del said," don't think I don't understand Jimmie, I've had more to do with children than you have. I know how he feels, and I know what he needs, he needs a woman. You take him on the boat there with alot of men and hell never get the grief out of him, he won't want to be a cry baby and he'll keep it all locked up inside him. He needs to be babied a little, Jim, and God knows he didn't get much-." "That's exactly why I'm taking him