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AT THAT time, it was the forsaken part, it was the other end of the city, and on early spring mornings there was no one about. By soft words, you could woo the horse into the foam, and ride her with the sea knee-deep around her. The waves came in and out there, as indolent as ladies, gathered up their skirts in their hands and, with a murmur, came tiptoeing in across the velvet sand.

The wooden promenade was high there, and when the wind was up the water came running under it like wild. On such days, you had to content yourself with riding the horse over the deep white drifts of dry sand on the other side of the walks; the horse’s hoofs here made no sound and the sparks of sand stung your face in fury. It had no body to it, like the mile or two of sand packed hard that you could open out on once the tide was down.

My little grandfather, Puss, was alive then, with his delicate gait and ankles, and his belly pouring in his dove-gray clothes. When he saw from the window that the tide was sidling out, he put on his pearl fedora and came stepping down the street. For a minute, he put one foot on the sand, but he was not at ease there. On the boardwalk over our heads was some other kind of life in progress.
If you looked up, you could see it in motion through the cracks in the timber: rolling chairs, and women in high heels proceeding, if the weather were fair.

“You know,” my grandfather said, “I think I might like to have a look at a shop or two along the boardwalk.” Or: “I suppose you don’t feel like leaving the beach for a minute,” or: “If you would go with me, we might take a chair together, and look at the hats and the dresses and roll along in the sun.”

He was alive then, taking his pick of the broad easy chairs and the black boys.

“There’s a nice skinny boy,” he’d say. “He looks as though he might put some action into it. Here you are, sonny. Push me and the little girl down to the Million Dollar Pier and back.”

The cushions were red velvet with a sheen of dew over them. And Puss settled back on them and took my hand in his. In his mind there was no hesitation about whether he would look at the shops on one side, or out on the vacant side where there was nothing shining but the sea.

“What’s your name, Charlie?” Puss would say without turning his head to the black boy pushing the chair behind our shoulders.

“Charlie’s my name, sir,” he’d answer with his face dripping down like tar in the sun.

“What’s your name, sonny?” Puss would say another time, and the black boy answered:

“Sonny’s my name, sir.”

“What’s your name, Big Boy?”

“Big Boy’s my name.”

He never wore a smile on his face, the black boy. He was thin as a shadow but darker, and he was pushing and sweating, getting the chair down to the Million Dollar Pier and back again, in and out through the people. If you turned toward the sea for a minute, you could see his face out of the corner of your eye, hanging black as a bat’s wing, nodding and nodding like a dark heavy flower.

But in the early morning, he was the only one who came down onto the sand and sat under the beams of the boardwalk, sitting idle there with a languor fallen on every limb. He had long bones. He sat idle there, with his clothes shrunk up from his wrists and his ankles, with his legs drawn up, looking out at the sea.

“I might be a king if I wanted to be,” was what he said to me.

Maybe I was twelve years old, or maybe I was ten when we used to sit eating dog biscuits together. Sometimes when you broke them in two, a worm fell out and the black boy lifted his sharp finger and flecked it carelessly from off his knee.

“I seen kings,” he said, “with a kind of cloth over they heads, and kind of jewels-like around here and here. They weren’t any blacker than me, if as black,” he said. “I could be almost anything I made up my mind to be.”

“King Nebuchadnezzar,” I said. “He wasn’t a white man.”

The wind was off the ocean and was filled with alien smells. It was early in the day, and no human sign was given. Overhead were the green beams of the boardwalk and no wheel or step to sound it.

“If I was a king,” said the black boy with his biscuit in his fingers, “I wouldn’t put much stock in hanging around here.”

Great crystal jelly beasts were quivering in a hundred different colors on the wastes of sand around us. The dogs came, jumping them, and when they saw me still sitting still, they wheeled like gulls and sped back to the sea.

“I’d be traveling around,” he said, “here and there. Now here, now there. I’d change most of my habits.”

His hair grew all over the top of his head in tight dry rosettes. His neck was longer and more shapely than a white man’s neck, and his fingers ran in and out of the sand like the blue feet of a bird.

“I wouldn’t have much to do with pushing chairs around under them circumstances,” he said. “I might even give up sleeping out here on the sand.”

Or if you came out when it was starlight, you could see him sitting there in the clear white darkness. I could go and come as I liked, for whenever I went out the door, I had the dogs shouldering behind me. At night, they shook the taste of the house out of their coats and came down across the sand. There he was, with his knees up, sitting idle.

“They used to be all kinds of animals come down here to drink in the dark,” he said. “They was a kind of a mirage came along and gave that impression. I seen tigers, lions, lambs, deer; I seen ostriches drinking down there side by side with each other. They’s the Northern Lights gets crossed some way and switches the wrong picture down.”

It may be that the coast has changed there, for even then it was changing. The lighthouse that had once stood far out on the white rocks near the outlet was standing then like a lighted torch in the heart of the town. And the deep currents of the sea may have altered so that the clearest water runs in another direction, and houses may have been built down as far as where the brink used to be. But the brink was so perilous then that every word the black boy spoke seemed to fall into a cavern of beauty.

“I seen camels; I seen zebras,” he said. “I might have caught any of one of them if I’d felt inclined.”

The street was so still and wide then that when Puss stepped out of the house, I could hear him clearing his throat of the sharp salty air. He had no intention of soiling the soles of his boots, but he came down the street to find me.

“If you feel like going with me,” he said, “we’ll take a chair and see the fifty-seven varieties changing on the electric sign.”

And then he saw the black boy sitting quiet. His voice drew up short on his tongue and he touched his white mustache.

“I shouldn’t think it a good idea,” he said, and he put his arm through my arm. “I saw another little oak not three inches high in the Jap’s window yesterday. We might roll down the boardwalk and have a look at it. You know,” said Puss, and he put his kid gloves carefully on his fingers, “that black boy might do you some kind of harm.”

“What kind of harm could he do me?” I said.

“Well,” said Puss with the garlands of lights hanging around him, “he might steal some money from you. He might knock you down and take your money away.”

“How could he do that?” I said. “We just sit and talk there.” Puss looked at me sharply.

“What do you find to sit and talk about?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember. It doesn’t sound like much to tell it.”

The burden of his words was lying there on my heart when I woke up in the morning. I went out by myself to the stable and led the horse to the door and put the saddle on her. If Puss were ill at ease for a day or two, he could look out the window in peace and see me riding high and mighty away. The day after tomorrow, I thought, or the next day, I’ll sit down on the beach again and talk to the black boy. But when I rode out, I saw him seated idle there, under the boardwalk, heedless, looking away to the cool wide sea. He had been eating peanuts and the shells lay all around him. The dogs came running at the horse’s heels, nipping the foam that lay along the tide.

The horse was as shy as a bird that morning, and when I drew her up beside the black boy, she tossed her head on high. Her mane went back and forth, from one side to the other, and a flight of joy in her limbs sent her forelegs like rockets into the air. The black boy stood up from the cold smooth sand, unsmiling, but a spark of wonder shone in his marble eyes. He put out his arm in the short tight sleeve of his coat and stroked her shivering shoulder.

“I was going to be a jockey once,” he said, “but I changed my mind.”

I slid down on one side while he climbed up the other.

“I don’t know as I can ride him right,” he said as I held her head. “The kind of saddle you have, it gives you nothing to grip your heels around. I ride them with their bare skin.”

The black boy settled himself on the leather and put his feet in the stirrups. He was quiet and quick with delight, but he had no thought of smiling as he took the reins in his hands.

I stood on the beach with the dogs beside me, looking after the horse as she ambled down to the water. The black boy rode easily and straight, letting the horse stretch out and sneeze and canter.

When they reached the jetty, he turned her casually and brought her loping back.

“Some folks licks hell out of their horses,” he said. “I’d never raise a hand to one, unless he was to bite me or do something I didn’t care for.”

He sat in the saddle at ease, as though in a rocker, stroking her shoulder with his hand spread open, and turning in the stirrups to smooth her shining flank.

“Jockeys make a pile of money,” I said.

“I wouldn’t care for the life they have,” said the black boy. “They have to watch their diet so careful.”

His fingers ran delicately through her hair and laid her mane back on her neck.

When I was up on the horse again, I turned her toward the board walk.

“I’m going to take her over the jetty,” I said. “You’ll see how she clears it. I’ll take her up under the boardwalk to give her a good start.”

I struck her shoulder with the end of my crop, and she started toward the tough black beams. She was under it, galloping, when the dogs came down the beach like mad. They had chased a cat out of cover and were after it, screaming as they ran, with a wing of sand blowing wide behind them, and when the horse saw them under her legs, she jumped sidewise in sprightliness and terror and flung herself against an iron arch.

For a long time I heard nothing at all in my head except the melody of someone crying, whether it was my dead mother holding me in comfort, or the soft wind grieving over me where I had fallen. I lay on the sand asleep; I could feel it running with my tears through my fingers. I was rocked in a cradle of love, cradled and rocked in sorrow.

“Oh, my little lamb, my little lamb pie!” Oh, sorrow, sorrow, wailed the wind, or the tide, or my own kin about me. “Oh, lamb, oh, lamb!”

I could feel the long swift fingers of love untying the terrible knot of pain that bound my head. And I put my arms around him and lay close to his heart in comfort.

Puss was alive then, and when he met the black boy carrying me up to the house, he struck him square across the mouth.