PL-524 A Chosen World

Excerpt

Often, during the evenings before school closed, that two hour long recess before the yellow wooden buses came to park under the shade of the oaks at the rear of the school, later to carry us over the back woods dirt roads to home, I would go down to the tin shower house and talk to the football boys as they came in off the freshly mown field to shower and dress before catching their buses.

One particularly dull afternoon I came upon the shower house a little late. All the boys had showered and gone except one—Norman.

He smiled when he saw me come up to the little window without panes which let in the air and the world outside, which had become a sound transmitter for all the giggling girls who, when walking along the path to their toilet, hurried by, their heads held purposely askew, their hands over their lips, their hysterical laughter like a den of witches in Macbeth.

Norman was a big, ox of a boy. A head taller than the other football players, and a much broader, with skin as white as milk and a riot of blond curls on his head that coiled like snakes over his cornflower blue eyes and always smelled of brilliantine. His mouth was too large for his face, a deep red diagonal line, but that face was rustic enough to have withstood any deformity and yet attained a mammoth handsomeness. His face was carved, as if from granite, with wide set eyes and cheekbones, protruding chin, dimpled, and wrinkled brows. A brow of the primitive, savage natures, but noble, somehow, majestic, even in this rural primeval world of moss and magnolia. He was as Southern as a boll of cotton.