Four Quarters Volume 8 Number 2 Four Quarters: January 1959 Vol
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Four Quarters Volume 8 Number 2 Four Quarters: January 1959 Vol. VIII No. Article 1 2 1-1959 Four Quarters: January 1959 Vol. VIII, No. 2 Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters Recommended Citation (1959) "Four Quarters: January 1959 Vol. VIII, No. 2," Four Quarters: Vol. 8 : No. 2 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters/vol8/iss2/1 This Complete Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Four Quarters by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. " mm§m^m^:mmn7¥. Jr^TsSiyMlvw p! tour ffnarters Miss Ruby Page 1 /I Vignette by J. C. Htdme Pasiphae Page 8 A Poem by Suzanne Gross A Matter of Family Page 11 A Story by Claude F. Koch too The Quittance of the Wound Page 18 A Poem by Brother Antoninus, O.P. Some Aspects of Freedom in Sartre's Existentialism Page 19 IS An Article by Joseph C. Mihalich Saint Aloysius at Mid-Day Page 26 A Poem by Dolores Kendrick The Sheepshank Page 31 >n> A Short Story by Thomas J. McCauley Art ns • Abraham and Isaac by Carl Merschel, Page 7 • Saint Peter by fames McDermott, Page 9 • The Death of A Poet by Fred Wassail, Page 10 • The Ch>: Jean Chariot, Page i7 • Parade by Mart,. 27 % Winter by Brother Dativus Gabriel. • Melchisdech by Carl Merschel, Page 3i' Poetry • Howard A. Wiley, Page 6 • 5/"-' ^^ O.S.F.. Page 7 • Thomas P. McDotm Urn • Samuel J. Hazo. Paee 29 • Gen Pane 29 Januarv, 1959 vol. V'lH, no. 2 • flfty cente Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Lyrasis IVIembers and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/fourquarters91unse Miss Ruby • J. C. Hulme hands MISS RUBY might Have gone it went she leaned with her on roaming the fields until against the window frame for sup- daybreak, trying to scare the port. But Miss Ruby got around to cotton up, had not the children be- being an old woman in her daugh- gun crying for her. She was at the ter's house again, an old woman house in a wink but something w^as standing motionless, like the night s wrong; it was not quite any known own surprised w^hite shadow, look- or remembered place. "Here, here! ing down at her gown and bare feet What is going on here?" she said and the long loosened hair running sternly, for the door was locked and wild over her shoulders. grinning at her. Through the door Turning to find the bed again, rang her voice in a defiant croon: feeling her way cautiously as if this "Mama is coming, children. Jamie room had been entered for the first still to be learned —' Will ^ Katie ^ never you mind, time and there was your Mama is here." RattUng the that a chair stood here and a dresser latch she remembered in a surge of there, she started at the sound of panic how frail as a bird's were the distant thunder, saying aloud, "W^as bones in the small vulnerable bodies that what it was? W^as it the rising of her children. W^hatever had pos- cloud out yonder that got me up? I sessed her to leave them alone for believed I was over all this. I one minute? "You open," she vv^his- haven't walked about in my sleep " pered fiercely, low enough so that since I don't know w^hen. the children might not hear and The mischief had begun after her grov^' more alarmed, all the w^hile husband died and stopped when she beating quietly with the heels of her lost the farm he left her. This must palms against the spiteful wood. be the first time she had done it "You open, I tell you! Can't you since then. My, how strange it was " hear my own calling to me? to catch yourself at it, after years But slowly the sound that had and years of thinking you had put been her children crying became it forever behind youl WTiy to- only the wind w^histling through its night, she wondered; why in the teeth, saying rain was on the way. world tonight? It had been coming in by a crack in Miss Ruby eased her head dowTi her dream. W^aking, she found her- onto the pillow and remembered self at the window pushing gently how in the old days she would go against the screen, the bellying or- out the door or \vindow and walk gandy curtain slapping at her face. all over creation. The year her Not all at once, however, did the youngest brother stayed ^vith her on bedroom declare itself. A moment the farm, the first year she was a was needed for the time and the widow, he kept saying how he heard place of the dream to go, and while her moving about in the night and 1 Four Quarters she as good as told Kim ne was a on in the room would put the near- liar. And then once that summer ing cloud and this lost hour in their she vvoKe him with it, and he fol- proper places. Rising on an elbow lowed her out of the house calhng, she fumbled impatiently in the clus- "Ruby, Ruby, you're at it again." ter of frills on the bedside table for She had come to the cedar tree on the lamp switch. the bluff above the river before she There, that was better, even if the heard him. At first she thought he walls did hit her in the face Nvhen was playing some kind of joke — the light went on. The hour felt very every one of her brothers had been late, but as the clock was always an amiable freckle-faced giant for- running down and she was forever ever ready to play one — but there forgetting to wind it, there was no were the tracks of her bare feet way to be sure. It was a marvel across the plowed field to show how Katie wasn't at the door asking if she had come so far and not known she were all right, after the noise about it. she must have made moving about. And to think that she had never Sounds penetrated this little house been the nervous or sickly kind such but there was no friendliness in floor foolishness might be expected from! or ceiling. Back home the rafters It hardly seemed possible that the would crack their knuckles in the sturdy young woman she used to see dark and seem to tell her, "Now, in the mirror, combing her long red now; go back to sleep. Ruby." But hair with a chapped or sunburnt here there was only a close oppres- hand, was the one who rose up in sion, and the rooms got to smelling sleep and went out in the night. If like a child's rubber ball after the she wondered about it till her dying windows had been shut for a spell. day, it still wouldn't be explained People used not to build houses the away. size of matchboxes. In the old days Old Miss Ruby heard the nearing a house was a long time coming into thunder grumble and rattle and saw being, v^^ith sturdy timbers off your how the lightning bleached the own land; and when it was finished room whiter at each stroke. There you had something that didn't look was no telling when she hadn't been as if it had shrunk in the ^vash. Her afraid of a storm. And weren't the father, now^, had called for twelve storms fearful when she was young: large rooms, because it would have wild black clouds stamping hard driven him to distraction if he hadn't rain in their stride across her fields. had space to walk about in. Even the memory of them w^as Sitting up in bed with the smoke enough; she'd never get to sleep weaving amiably before her half- again until she could tell how this closed eyes, Miss Ruby let her coming rain would fall. thoughts glide from her father to her It came in her mind that nobody mother, that fierce little lady vv^ho was there to complain if she had a had battled so hard to fill her with smoke on her old clay pipe. 'Ladies dainty, careful w^ays. In her mind's don't do such things any more. eye she saw her mother as she was Mama," Katie never got tired of say- in her prime, though strangely small ing. Well, she knew all that, in memory, stamping her foot in but just a puff or bwo would do the anger over the big daughter's dread- trick; a pinch of tobacco and a light ful needlework; she heard the silent Miss Ruby cry beneath Ker scolding: "Wliere that dream didn't belong to me any is the fine lady I set my heart on more, because I ve raised the two raising? Oh, you're him all up and You spared me and looks like there down; you're your father's child, you is nothing I(;ft to do." arel" And Miss Ruby saw the girl The thunder was closer now. she used to be incline an awkward, Wasn't it the summer after her humble head before this one person baby s death that she had begun to in the world who awed her, promis- show how afraid she was of a storm? ing, more to the unspoken cry than She'd make sure Katie and Will to the words she had been hearing, had plump feather beds to sleep on, "You just w^ait.