It

direction. Henry took the bait and broke that way — too fast and too far to pull himself back. Reversing with a sweet and natural speed, Mike took off to the right (in high school he would make the varsity football
team as a tailback his sophomore year, and was only kept from breaking the school’s all-time scoring record by a broken leg halfway through his senior season). He would have made it easily past Henry but for the mud. It was greasy, and Mike slipped to his knees. Before he could get up, Henry was upon him.
‘Niggerniggernigger!’ Henry cried in a kind of religious ecstasy as he rolled Mike over. Mud went up the back of Mike’s shirt and down the back of his pants. He could feel it squeezing into his shoes. But he did not begin to cry until Henry slathered mud across hi s face, plugging up both of his nostrils.
‘Now you’re black!’ Henry had screamed gleefully, rubbing mud in Mike’s hair. ‘Now you’re REEEELY black!’ He ripped up Mike’s poplin jacket and the tee-shirt beneath and slammed a poultice of mud down over the boy’s bellybutton. ‘Now you’re as black as midnight in a MINESHAFT!’ Henry screamed triumphantly, and slammed mudplugs into both of Mike’s ears. Then he stood back, muddy hands hooked into his belt, and yelled: I ‘ killed your dog, black boy!’ But Mike did not hear this because of the mud in his ears and his own terrified sobs.
Henry kicked a final sticky clot of mud onto Mike and then turned and walked home, not looking back. A few moments later, Mike got up and did the same, still weeping.
His mother was of course furious; she wanted Will Hanlon to call Chief Borton and have him out to the Bowers house before the sun went down. ‘He’s been after Mikey before,’ Mike heard her say. He was sitting in the bathtub and his parents were in the kitchen. This was his second tub of water; the first had turned black almost the moment he had stepped into it and sat down. In her fury, his mother had lapsed into a thick Texas patois Mike could barely understand. ‘You put the law on him, Will Hanlon! Both the dog an d the pup! You law em, hear me?’
Will heard, but did not do as his wife asked. Eventually, when she cooled down (by then it was that night and Mike two hours asleep), he refreshed her on the facts of life. Chief Borton was not Sheriff Sullivan. If Borton had been sheriff when the incident of the poisoned chickens occurred, Will would never have gotten his two hundred dollars and would have had to be content with that state of affairs. Some men would stand behind you and some men wouldn’t; Borton was of the latter type. He was, in fact, a jellyfish.
‘Mike has had trouble with that kid before, yes,’ he told Jessica. ‘But he hasn’t had much because he’s careful around Henry Bowers. This will serve to make him more careful.’
‘You mean you’re just going to let it go?’
‘Bowers has told his son stories about his dealings with me, I guess,’ Will said, ‘and his son hates the three of us because of them, and because his father has also told him that hating niggers is what men are supposed to do. It all comes back to that. I can’t change the fact that our son is a Negro any more than I can sit here and tell you that Henry Bowers is going to be the last one to take after him because his skin’s brown. He’s going to have to deal with it all the rest of his life, as I have dealt with it, and you have dealt with it. Why, right there in that Christian school you were bound he was going to go to the teacher told them blacks weren’t as good as whites because Noah’s son Ham looked at his father while he was drunk and naked and Noah’s other two boys cast their eyes aside. That’s why the sons of Ham were condemned to always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, she said. And Mikey said she was lookin right at him while she told that story to them.’
Jessica looked at her husband, mute and miserable. Two tears fell, one from each eye, and tracked slowly down her face. ‘Isn’t there ever any getting away from it?’
His reply was kind but implacable; it was a tune when wives believed their husbands, and Jessica had no reason to doubt her Will.
‘No. There is no getting away from the word nigger, not now, not in the world we’ve been given to live in, you and me. Country niggers from Maine are still niggers. I have thought,
times, that the reason I came back to Derry was that there is no better place to remember that. But I’ll have a talk with the boy.’
The next day he called Mike out of the barn. Will sat on the yoke of his harrow and patted a place next to him for Mike.
‘You want to stay out of that Henry Bowers’s way,’ he said.
Mike nodded.
‘His father is crazy.’
Mike nodded again. He had heard as