5. The Playground (cont.)

What Mommy didn’t know, though, was that I was also afraid of facing the wall next to my crib. The wall was too dark. It was too scary. Not even the bars of my crib could hold off that dark scariness, and I was always careful not so much as to glance in the direction of that dark wall when I was in my bed.

But this night Mommy commanded me to face the wall, so I did. I was, I suppose, even more afraid of Daddy than I was of the wall. I lay there for a long, painful time, waiting for sleep, for some kind of rescue to come, and that was when the horses appeared for the first time. I must finally have turned away from the black wall, toward the window on the opposite side of the room, because that was where I saw the two dapple-gray work horses entering the room. They pulled an old gray wagon, and an old farmer, as gray as the horses and wagon, rode on the high seat of the wagon and held the reins.

I was not particularly surprised by the horses and the wagon and the farmer. I often saw them plodding their way into town. I might have wondered, just at first, how they had gotten small enough to come through the window next to my brother’s bed, but I was so delighted to see them that I didn’t wonder long. Had they come to rescue me from the dark?

I watched their entrance. They were small when they came in through the window. Just the size to fit. And it seemed perfectly reasonable that they grew larger as they drove along the wall behind my brother’s bed and larger still along the next wall behind the blue desk.

When they came to the wall next to my crib, they had grown almost to full size, and by the time they circled my crib and came out into the middle of the floor, they were as big as I had ever seen them in town. The wagon needed to be big, I could see now, because it was full of children.