Hawken School - Onyx / Red and Gray Yearbook (Gates Mills, OH)

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H KE AN. iD GUR Ag ST ERA aes BS OMG LR

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gE as Bd a ie PAD ALE Neat) CER VAtey BO. -O--K First Grade (L to R): Terry Miller, Weston Howell, Jonathan Bishop, Hazzard Adams. [ 27 ]

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2 HOE RAED A N D GORA Yo = BOO! RK Hard Times AMES MADDEN slowly moved along the J street toward his home. His tired face with its sad eyes, sunken cheeks and pitifully thin neck was bowed in dejection upon his scrawny chest. His clothes, once fairly fash- ionable, were now spotted and grimy. On his head was a dirty gray fedora with a shapeless, turned down brim. The sweat from his brow had stained its band in an irregular line. He wore a heavy brown tweed overcoat which had lost all of its wooliness at the seat and elbows. The lapels had lost their smart cut and straggling black threads hung where two of the buttons should have been. The coat hung loose and open, exposing a faded shiny blue suit, spotted and out of press. The trousers bagged at the knees and barely reached his shoe tops. To a wrinkled, dirty, soft collar was fastened a black string tie, threadbare and worn from many tyings. His aching feet were encased in old black oxfords. their leather hopelessly cracked and cut. The weather was unseasonably warm. It was the second day of a sudden February thaw, and only a few patches of dirty snow remained in the shadows. The trees were gray, bleak skeletons with a few dry leaves here and there rattling in the soft, unnaturally abated wind. The lawns were soft and mushy, with little pools of black water and damp little hummocks of faded brown grass scattered about. Where the earth was bare, there stood dull brown morasses of slick clay covered by a thin film of snow water. The sky above was of a leaden hue, shedding a dull light on the sleep- ing vegetation and the surly city. On paper-thin soles, James Madden care- fully picked his way among the glistening pud- dles of water along a sidewalk that was plas- tered with wet, dead leaves and rotting candy wrappers and pieces of orange peel. From time to time he raised his hand to his eyes to clear his blurred vision. He no longer was able to afford the regular treatments for the chronic muscle affliction in his eyes and his 9 glasses had been broken for several weeks. The same dull, searing pain was coming back. The same pain with which he had tossed for a month on a tiny cot in the crowded hospital in France. The same pain which had almost gone when they decorated him for bravery. The medal still lay at home in his desk, the silent, worthless manifestation of a wasted struggle. He shook his head with a jerk to drive off the blur. Halfway up the street he slowly turned into a yard and paused for a moment, looking at the scene before him. He saw a small, six- room, Dutch Colonial house with clapboard sides, a red brick chimney, and a black- shingled roof. It was of a faded white color, its paint now bubbly and peeling. The win- dows were streaked with dirt and rainmarks, and below each one a streaking smudge ran down the wall for a little way and then faded into the griminess of the paint. James Madden went up the walk through a squalid front garden of patchy grass and sad, scraggly bushes and shrubs. A small dead elm tree stood forlornly in the center of the plot amid a litter of old newspapers and scattered He slowly mounted the front steps, stopping to kick aside a rusty pair sticks and leaves. of roller skates at the top. He crossed the mud-tracked porch with its rotting timbers and He opened the front door and entered his house. boxes of shriveled flowers. After quietly hanging his coat on its hook in the hall, he again paused for a moment to look at a paper which he drew from his pocket. It was a bank book, and its last entry was marked in red, “Balance—O; Account Closed.”’ The last of that dwindling supply was gone. He thought of the note due on the first; the meat and grocery bill; the water bill; coal run- ning low; insurance gone; shoes and clothes . With- out a sound, he turned and went into the kitchen. for Mary and the kids; poor Mary .