The Short-Circuit

"Shoo, it's only little Stray Ensley. I'll take him home when I go," the
redoubtable Mikey assured me with a wide smile at the kiddie, which was
answered with a rapture of hero worship.

"What's his name?" demanded Charlotte as if seeking a passport.

"Just Stray," answered Mikey in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. "He
ain't got no father, dead or alive."

"Then Stray is just short for stranger, because everybody else has
fathers, dead, alive or drunk," said Charlotte, in the same
matter-of-fact tone that Mikey had used, and he in no way seemed to feel
her remark personally derogatory to his paternal parent.

"Well, let's take him to Minister to be learned his verses of the song
and dance. Come on, for we are keeping him and the Lord waiting," said
Charlotte as she marshaled them all into the Little House and calmly
shut the door in my face and left me standing alone in the middle of the
walk. Even the yellow pup had squeezed into the door before it was shut
and only I was left in the outer darkness away from the grand opera
voice that I could hear booming with a juvenile chorus out at the back
of the cottage where I knew the rehearsal was being held under the twin
of the old apple tree from which the front roof tree over my head was
eternally separated by the Little House. With actual sadness and a queer
feeling of shut-outness I did the only thing left to me and sauntered
slowly on up the hill under the tall old elm trees that the Town had
planted a century ago to keep the heat from the heads of the like of me
while the toilers down in the Settlement had no such proof of ancestral
care.