'We are going at this a little hindpart-before, ain't we? I'm the one who should be asking you if I can go.' Because he was thinking about his mother, not just remembered about her because he had done that as soon as they crossed the Square five minutes ago and the simplest thing would have been to get out of his uncle's car there and go and get in the sheriff's car and simply stay in it until they were ready to go back out to the church and he had probably thought about it at the time and would even have done it probably if he hadn't been so worn out and anticlimaxed and dull for sleep and he knew he couldn't cope with her this time even if he had been completely fresh; the very fact that he had already done it twice in eleven hours, once by secrecy and once by sheer surprise and of rapidity of movement and of mass, but doomed him completer now to defeat and rout: musing on his uncle's naive and childlike rationalizing about school and bed when faced with the fluid and implacable attack, when once more his uncle read his mind, standing beside the car and looking down at him for another moment with compassion and no hope even though he was a bachelor of fifty thirty-five years free of woman's dominion, his uncle too knowing remembering how she would use the excuses of his education and his physical exhaustion only less quicker than she would have discarded them; who would listen no more to rational reasons for his staying at home than for - civic duty or simple justice or humanity or to save a life or even the peace of his own immortal soul - his going. His uncle said:
'All right. Come on. I'll talk to her.'
He moved, getting out; he said suddenly and quietly, in amazement not at despair of hope but at how much hopelessness you could really stand: 'You're just my uncle.'
'I'm worse than that,' his uncle said. 'I'm a man.' Then his uncle read his mind again: "All right. I'll try to talk to Paralee too. The same condition obtains there; motherhood doesn't seem to have any pigment in its skin.'
And his uncle too was probably thinking how you not only couldn't beat them, you couldn't even find the battlefield in time to admit defeat before they had moved it again; he remembered, it was two years ago now, he had finally made the high school football team or that is he had won or been chosen for one of the positions to make an out-of-town trip because the regular player had been injured in practice or fallen behind in his grades or maybe his mother either wouldn't let him go, something, he had forgotten exactly what because he had been too busy that Thursday and Friday racking his brains in vain to think how to tell his mother he was going to Mottstown to play on the regular team, right up to the last minute when he had to tell her something and so did: baldly: and weathered it since his father happened to be present (though he really hadn't calculated it that way - not that he wouldn't have if he hadn't been too worried and perplexed with a blending of anger and shame and shame at being angry and ashamed ((crying at her at one point 'Is it the team's fault that I'm the only child you've got?')) to think of it) and left that Friday afternoon with the team feeling as he imagined a soldier might feel wrenching out of his mother's restraining arms to go fight a battle for some shameful cause; she would grieve for him of course if he fell and she would even look on his face again if he didn't but there would be always ineradicable between them the ancient green and perennial adumbration; so that all that Friday night trying to go to sleep in a strange bed and all the next forenoon too waiting for the game to start he thought better for the team if he had not come since he probably had too much on his mind to be worth anything to it: until the first whistle blew and on and afterward until bottom-most beneath the piled mass of both teams, the ball clutched to his chest and his mouth and nostrils both full of the splashed dried whitewash marking the goal line he heard and recognized above all the others that one voice shrill triumphant and bloodthirsty and picked up at last and the wind thumped back into him he saw her foremost in the crowd not sitting in the grandstand but among the ones trotting and even running up and down the sideline following each play, then in the car that evening on the way back to Jefferson, himself in the front seat beside the hired driver and his mother and three of the other players in the back and her voice as proud and serene and pitiless as his own could have been: 'Does your arm still hurt?'