The Bean Trees Chapter I

It turned out that I was to work mainly for Eddie Rickett, who was in charge of the lab
—this was blood and pee and a few worse things though I was not about to complain—
and the x-rays.

“That’s my big girl bringing home the bacon,” she would say, and cook those things and serve them up like Thanksgiving for the two of us.

You could have painted a barn
with all the lipstick that went into “H. W. enraptured forever” and things of that kind.

The sun was headed fast for the flat horizon, and then there would be nothing but
twelve hours of headlights in front of me.

“Ketchup,” the gray-hat cowboy said.

Lab
and x-ray were in two connected rooms with people always coming in and out through
the swinging doors with their hands full and their shoes squeaking on the black linoleum.

“See, just the windshield.

Some had Indians in various
hokey poses, but most were views-from-the-air of Oral Roberts University, which
apparently was in the vicinity—although I’m pretty sure if it had been within two
hundred miles I could have seen it from the parking lot.

Eddie was an old freckled thing, not really old but far enough along that
everybody noticed he hadn’t gotten married.

That
is, apart from the pictures on the gas station brochures: Tennessee claimed to be the
Volunteer State, and Missouri the Show-Me State, whatever that might mean, and nearly
everyplace appeared to have plenty of ladies in fifties hairdos standing near waterfalls.

It was basically the same idea as the guy and his
mother in Psycho, except that Norman Bates in Psycho was a taxidermist and knew how to
preserve his mother so she wouldn’t totally rot out.

The jukebox was playing Kenny
Rogers and the TV behind the counter was turned on, although the sound was off.

At school it was a piece of cake to pick me out of a
lineup of town girls in their beige or pink Bobbie Brooks matching sweater-and-skirt
outfits.

It was Jolene Shanks and
everybody was a little surprised at her, or anyway pretended to be, but not at him.

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the tandard Oil sign.

The sounds of the cars on the
highway seemed to get sucked straight out over the empty fields where there was
nothing, not even a silo, to stop them from barreling on forever into the night.

I didn’t have time to think about what that meant before Jolene Shanks, or Hardbine
rather, was rolled in on a wheelchair and then came a stretcher right behind her, which
they parked out in the hallway.

There was a
bruise twice the size of my thumb on its inner arm.

She’d had an old grandpa that was full-blooded Cherokee, one of the few
that got left behind in Tennessee because he was too old or too ornery to get marched
over to Oklahoma.

Her right hand twisted over and
back as she snapped a little curl of string off the end of each pod and rolled out the peas
with her thumb.

By the grace of some miracle I surely did not yet
deserve, I managed to wobble off the highway all in one piece and find a service station.

At school it was a piece of cake to pick me out of a
lineup of town girls in their beige or pink Bobbie Brooks matching sweater-and-skirt
outfits.

The younger one was wearing my two favorite colors,
turquoise and red.

This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood.

“The next phone
booth we come to, I’m going to have to call 1-800-THE LORD.”

She looked up at me, her eyes swimming through her thick glasses like enormous
tadpoles.

I wanted Mama to be home when I got there, so I could bawl my head off and tell her I
was quitting.

Surely
you would think he’d pick Earl Wickentot, who could dissect an earthworm without fear.

Her fingers were wiggling and slapping at the
surface of the water, no doubt trying to grab hold of something.

‘You won’t mind if I just bring the poor kid in here to
warm up while you decide.”

I sat down at the counter and gave the man a dime for the postcard.

Her hair lay across her shoulders in a pair of skinny, lifeless plaits.

It was basically the same idea as the guy and his
mother in Psycho, except that Norman Bates in Psycho was a taxidermist and knew how to
preserve his mother so she wouldn’t totally rot out.

I kept my
fingers crossed through Sidney, Sadorus, Cerro Gordo, Decatur, and Blue Mound, and
coasted into Taylorville on the fumes.

My car has no actual way of keeping track of miles, but I believe it must have been fifty
or more before we came to a town.

Then
he yelled for the other one, and two guys rolled in the long stretcher with the sheet over it
and started hoisting it up on the table like something served up on a big dinner plate.

He got into a pickup truck but didn’t start the
ignition or turn on the lights.

The kids backed off from the car rubbing their hands on their sides, like they were
wiping off anything their hands might have already imagined grabbing onto.

About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department.

Missy was what everyone called me, not that it was my name, but because when I was three supposedly I stamped my foot and told my own mother not to call me Marietta but Miss Marietta, as I had to call all the people including children in the houses where she worked Miss this or Mister that, and so she did from that day forward.

She took one of the hard wooden seats that swung down from the wall, and sat
there blubbering, saying, “Thank God the baby was at Mom’s.”

Her right hand twisted over and
back as she snapped a little curl of string off the end of each pod and rolled out the peas
with her thumb.

She started telling me how it was all Newt’s daddy’s fault, he beat him up, beat
her up, and even had hit the baby with a coal scuttle.

After the cool night, the hot air inside the bar hit me like something you could swim
through.

I learned to look in a microscope at red blood cells, platelets they are
called though they aren’t like plates but little catchers’ mitts, and to count them in the
little squares.

A person might think I didn’t do much else with all that time other
than keeping Mama entertained and off and on dating Sparky Pike—who most people
considered to be a high-class catch because he had a steady job as a gas-meter man—until
I got fed up with hearing who laid out in their backyards by their meters wearing what
(or nothing-but-what) in the summer-time.

I hadn’t been there even one whole week when hell busted loose.

Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair.

And sometimes you’d see the big
ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like darkbrown
dreams.

Suddenly the steering wheel bore no
relation to where the car was going.

Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair.

“Here,” I said, and
handed her a washcloth that had BROKEN ARROW written on the selvage in indelible
magic marker.

The
trouble with that is it doesn’t get you anywhere, no more than some kid on a bicycle
going no hands and no feet up and down past his mother and hollering his head off for
her to look.

Earl’s ninety-nine-cent burger brought me around a little, though I still felt like my
head had been stuffed with that fluffy white business they use in life preservers.

But it was easy to push
start without help once you got the hang of it, the wrong foot on the clutch and the other
leg out the door, especially if you parked on a hill, which in that part of Kentucky you
could hardly do anything but.

The most amazing thing was the way that child held on.

You could smell leaves rotting
into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet
making dents in the surface but never falling through.

Frequently a man with clean fat hands and a crest of hair like a woodpecker
would talk on and on without sound.

By the time I was in high school and got my first job and all the rest, including the
whole awful story about Newt Hardbine which I am about to tell you, he was of course
not in school anymore.

It was marigolds and Hot Tamale cosmos.

He came high-railing in there like some blond Paul McCartney, sitting on the
desk in his tight jeans and his clean shirt sleeves rolled up just so, with the cuffs turned
in.

She snapped about three peas to every one of mine.

I thought to myself, I guess now Indians can be
cowboys too, though probably not vice versa.

He made our country boys look like the hand-me-down socks Mama brought home,
all full of their darns and mends.

I took out the stamps I had brought from home wrapped in waxed paper, and licked
one and stuck it on my souvenir postcard from the Cherokee Nation.

I hadn’t any sooner gotten the hands
pried loose from my fingers before they grabbed onto my shirt sleeves and my hair.

Of course, if she had ever been there she would have known it was not a place you’d
ever go to live without some kind of lethal weapon aimed at your hind end.

My mama said the Hardbines had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown.

Mama settled back into the cane chair and scooped up another apronful of peas.

All my life, Mama had talked about the Cherokee Nation as our
ace in the hole.

He was famous for drinking Old Grand Dad with a gasoline
funnel, and always told Mama never to pull anything cute like getting pregnant.

That
is, apart from the pictures on the gas station brochures: Tennessee claimed to be the
Volunteer State, and Missouri the Show-Me State, whatever that might mean, and nearly
everyplace appeared to have plenty of ladies in fifties hairdos standing near waterfalls.

I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was
there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish.

“The way I see it,” she said, “a person isn’t nothing more than a scarecrow.

He slid the ketchup bottle down the counter so hard it rammed my cup and
spilled out probably five cents’ worth of coffee.

And sometimes you’d see the big
ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like darkbrown
dreams.

You could smell leaves rotting
into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet
making dents in the surface but never falling through.

She was slumped down and rocking a little bit in the chair, holding her hurt
shoulder and looking at her feet.

I thought, and then I said, “I have a bicycle pump.

While I was deciding, the lights in the bar flickered out.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

I can’t really afford to pay for a room, and I wouldn’t even bother
you except I’ve got a child out in that car that’s wet and cold and looking to catch
pneumonia if I don’t get it to bed someplace warm.”

When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of blue-gills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb, and the way Mama would carry on you would think I’d caught the famous big lunker in Shep’s Lake that old men were
always chewing their tobacco and thinking about.

My car gave out somewhere in the middle of a great emptiness that according to the
第 11 页 共 179 页
http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原版英语阅读网
road signs was owned by the Cherokee tribe.

I had read about Indian mummies out West.

When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of blue-gills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb, and the way Mama would carry on you would think I’d caught the famous big lunker in Shep’s Lake that old men were
always chewing their tobacco and thinking about.

Her right hand twisted over and
back as she snapped a little curl of string off the end of each pod and rolled out the peas
with her thumb.

I sat in the
parking lot looking out over that godless stretch of nothing and came the closest I have
ever come to cashing in and plowing under.

There was a wet tongue of blood from her right shoulder all the way down her
bosom, and all the color was pulled out of her lips and face, her big face like a piece of
something cut out of white dough.

Then
he yelled for the other one, and two guys rolled in the long stretcher with the sheet over it
and started hoisting it up on the table like something served up on a big dinner plate.

He looked at me and then looked back to the
TV, like I wasn’t the kind of thing to be bothered with.

I had never
imagined that any part of a round earth could be so flat.

I had
looked at some maps, but since I had never in my own memory been outside of Kentucky
(I was evidently born across the river in Cincinnati, but that is beside the point), I had no
way of knowing why or how any particular place might be preferable to any other.

Just
another pretty picture for the coroner’s office, Eddie said, but I couldn’t stop staring.

Just
another pretty picture for the coroner’s office, Eddie said, but I couldn’t stop staring.

The
air in there was so hot and stale I felt like I had to breathe it twice to get any oxygen out
of it.

He was from out
of state, from some city college up north, which was why, everyone presumed, his name
was backwards.

Finally her hands were empty and relaxed.

I
imagined myself stepping outside and the wind just scattering me.

It was a family trait.

Before long I was just another one of them, filing papers in the right place and carrying
human waste products without making a face.

She wrapped her blanket around
and around it until it became a round bundle with a head.

I held her by the elbows trying not to hurt her any more than she was already
hurt, but poor thing she was hysterical and fighting me and wouldn’t shut up.

She went to the edge of the porch and shook a handful of pea hulls out of her apron
onto the flowerbed.

She and I both had enough blood to qualify.

I picked out one with two Indian women on it, an older and a younger, pretty one,
standing side by side next to some corn-grinding thing.

I had never
imagined that any part of a round earth could be so flat.

Earl’s place could
have done with a scrub.

My car gave out somewhere in the middle of a great emptiness that according to the
第 11 页 共 179 页
http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原版英语阅读网
road signs was owned by the Cherokee tribe.

I had
resented how Floyd’s Mill Road was three whole words, a dollar and five cents.

Kind of chilly, though.”

When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of blue-gills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb, and the way Mama would carry on you would think I’d caught the famous big lunker in Shep’s Lake that old men were
always chewing their tobacco and thinking about.

I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which
we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these
sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer’s wife.

Her hair lay across her shoulders in a pair of skinny, lifeless plaits.

The floor was
linoleum in a pattern that looked like rubber bricks set in mortar.

It was getting cold with no windows, and the poor
little thing must have been freezing but didn’t make a peep.

When I drove around to the front, a swarm of little boys came down on my car like
bees on a bear.

I suppose he meant the
type they give you when you go into the army, to see if you’re color blind, not the type
that starts with the big E. He said it when we were breaking up, but I was actually kind of
flattered.

The way she looked at them made me feel like if I had
better sense I’d be scared.

It was getting cold with no windows, and the poor
little thing must have been freezing but didn’t make a peep.

It was in this frame of mind that I made it to my last year of high school without event.

He made our country boys look like the hand-me-down socks Mama brought home,
all full of their darns and mends.

From the first moment I
picked it up out of its nest of wet blanket, it attached itself to me by its little hands like
roots sucking on dry dirt.

They said Doc Finchler was called and on his way, but that Nurse MacCullers had
checked her over and it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was
there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish.

Some had Indians in various
hokey poses, but most were views-from-the-air of Oral Roberts University, which
apparently was in the vicinity—although I’m pretty sure if it had been within two
hundred miles I could have seen it from the parking lot.

They
eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn’t dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward.

Her hands shook when she lifted
them off the counter and her head shook all the time, just slightly, like she was trying to
signal “No” to somebody behind my back, on the sly.

It was in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have that giant McDonald’s thing towering over
the city, but that didn’t seem possible.

But we were cut out of basically the same mud, I suppose, just two more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on our feet.

She couldn’t know that all I was seeing behind those
shut eyes was Newt Hardbine’s daddy flying up into the air, in slow motion, like a fish
flinging sideways out of the water.

It was not an Indian blanket but a plain
pink wool blanket with a satin band sewed on the edge, exactly like one Mama and I had
at home.

Mr. Walter had a wife, Lynda, whose
第 5 页 共 179 页
http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原版英语阅读网
existence was ignored by at least the female portion of the high school but who was
nevertheless alive and well, and was in fact one of the head nurses.

In my
mind’s eye I could see myself in my lead apron standing over Jolene, and this is exactly
what I looked like: a butcher holding down a calf on its way to becoming a cut of meat.

Lab
and x-ray were in two connected rooms with people always coming in and out through
the swinging doors with their hands full and their shoes squeaking on the black linoleum.

I kept my
fingers crossed through Sidney, Sadorus, Cerro Gordo, Decatur, and Blue Mound, and
coasted into Taylorville on the fumes.

And for all I ever knew of my own daddy I can’t say we weren’t, except for Mama swearing up and down that he was nobody I knew and was long gone besides.

A person might think I didn’t do much else with all that time other
than keeping Mama entertained and off and on dating Sparky Pike—who most people
considered to be a high-class catch because he had a steady job as a gas-meter man—until
I got fed up with hearing who laid out in their backyards by their meters wearing what
(or nothing-but-what) in the summer-time.

We passed a sign that said some-odd number of miles to the Pioneer Woman Museum.

I wanted Mama to be home when I got there, so I could bawl my head off and tell her I
was quitting.

She was someone you could have
drawn a picture of by tracing around dimes and quarters and jar tops.

I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which
we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these
sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer’s wife.

Sometimes it gave a telephone number, and sometimes
it just said “Praise the Lord.”

In my
mind’s eye I could see myself in my lead apron standing over Jolene, and this is exactly
what I looked like: a butcher holding down a calf on its way to becoming a cut of meat.

The
air in there was so hot and stale I felt like I had to breathe it twice to get any oxygen out
of it.

It was basically the same idea as the guy and his
mother in Psycho, except that Norman Bates in Psycho was a taxidermist and knew how to
preserve his mother so she wouldn’t totally rot out.

Another pickup truck swung around in the gravel parking lot and headed
off toward the highway.

Not that I was moony over him, at least no more than the standard of the day, which
was plain to see from the walls of the girls’ bathroom.

The ad I
wrote said: FOUND PUPPY, BROWN SPOTS, NEAR FLOYD’S MILL ROAD.

I would float out over
the flat, dark plain like the silvery fuzz from a milk-weed pod.

I suppose he meant the
type they give you when you go into the army, to see if you’re color blind, not the type
that starts with the big E. He said it when we were breaking up, but I was actually kind of
flattered.

They
eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn’t dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward.

When I drove over the Pittman line I made two promises to myself.

“Merciful heavens,” I said.

The other one in the gray
hat looked like he had a mean streak to him.

I decided
to let the gas tank decide.

At school it was a piece of cake to pick me out of a
lineup of town girls in their beige or pink Bobbie Brooks matching sweater-and-skirt
outfits.

These orderlies came in from the emergency room yelling for Eddie to get ready for a
mess in x-ray.

But we were cut out of basically the same mud, I suppose, just two more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on our feet.

Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair.

Before that exact moment I don’t believe I had given much thought to the future.

In my first few years at Pittman County
Hospital I was able to help Mama out with the rent and the bills and still managed to
save up a couple hundred dollars.

Frequently a man with clean fat hands and a crest of hair like a woodpecker
would talk on and on without sound.

I took out the stamps I had brought from home wrapped in waxed paper, and licked
one and stuck it on my souvenir postcard from the Cherokee Nation.

“No offense, but the Cherokee Nation is crap.

By senior year there were maybe two boys to every one of us, and we believed it was our
special reward when we got this particular science teacher by the name of Mr. Hughes
Walter.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

A person might think I didn’t do much else with all that time other
than keeping Mama entertained and off and on dating Sparky Pike—who most people
considered to be a high-class catch because he had a steady job as a gas-meter man—until
I got fed up with hearing who laid out in their backyards by their meters wearing what
(or nothing-but-what) in the summer-time.

I drove across the big patch of dirt that lay between the garage and
another small brick-shaped building that had a neon Budweiser light in the window.

This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood.

Its abundance of potato bugs and gossip, perhaps.

The sounds of the cars on the
highway seemed to get sucked straight out over the empty fields where there was
nothing, not even a silo, to stop them from barreling on forever into the night.

Some had Indians in various
hokey poses, but most were views-from-the-air of Oral Roberts University, which
apparently was in the vicinity—although I’m pretty sure if it had been within two
hundred miles I could have seen it from the parking lot.

I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which
we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these
sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer’s wife.

But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a fence, I had this feeling about what
Newt’s whole life was going to amount to, and I felt sorry for him.

In our high school days the general idea of fun had been to paint
“Class of ’75” on the water tower, or maybe tie some farmer’s goat up there on
Halloween, but now I had serious intentions.

It’s like the specimens back at the hospital, I told myself.

The Indian man wore a brown hat and had
a brown, fine-looking face that reminded me of an eagle, not that I had ever actually seen
an eagle.

About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department.

I told her the
whole thing, even Jolene’s pink bow-ribbon top and the blood and all, and of course
Newt, and then I told her I’d probably seen the worst I was going to see so there was no
reason to quit now.

In our high school days the general idea of fun had been to paint
“Class of ’75” on the water tower, or maybe tie some farmer’s goat up there on
Halloween, but now I had serious intentions.

My car has no actual way of keeping track of miles, but I believe it must have been fifty
or more before we came to a town.

It had these
little openings on the shoulders and bows on the sleeves, though of course it was shot to
hell now.
第 8 页 共 179 页
http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原版英语阅读网
Jolene was a pie-faced, heavy girl and I always thought she looked the type to have
gone and found trouble just to show you didn’t have to be a cheerleader to be fast.

Eddie was an old freckled thing, not really old but far enough along that
everybody noticed he hadn’t gotten married.

I had a foggy understanding that I
wasn’t arguing the right point.

I had
looked at some maps, but since I had never in my own memory been outside of Kentucky
(I was evidently born across the river in Cincinnati, but that is beside the point), I had no
way of knowing why or how any particular place might be preferable to any other.

Just
another pretty picture for the coroner’s office, Eddie said, but I couldn’t stop staring.

We
第 9 页 共 179 页
http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原版英语阅读网
didn’t talk too much more about it but I felt better with her there, the two of us moving
around each other in the kitchen making boiled greens and eggs for dinner while it
finally went dark outside.

The bleeding was stopped, but they
would need x-rays to see where the bullet was and if it had cracked anything on its way
in.

I looked at Eddie wanting to know would I have to get her out of her top and brassiere
into one of the gowns, and couldn’t help thinking about bloodstains all over the creation,
having been raised you might say in the cleaning-up business.

“If I wanted a baby I would have stayed in Kentucky,” I informed her.

It was Jolene Shanks and
everybody was a little surprised at her, or anyway pretended to be, but not at him.

There were four or five motels pretty much in a row, their little glass-fronted offices
shining out over the highway like TV screens.

It turned out that I was to work mainly for Eddie Rickett, who was in charge of the lab
—this was blood and pee and a few worse things though I was not about to complain—
and the x-rays.

This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood.

By the grace of some miracle I surely did not yet
deserve, I managed to wobble off the highway all in one piece and find a service station.

Its abundance of potato bugs and gossip, perhaps.

I knew how people
could toot their own horn without any earthly cause.

What was the penalty for carrying a dead Indian child across state lines?

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

The floor was
linoleum in a pattern that looked like rubber bricks set in mortar.

I suppose you could say
I had some part in choosing this name, but there was enough of destiny in it to satisfy me.

These orderlies came in from the emergency room yelling for Eddie to get ready for a
mess in x-ray.

I held the steering wheel and dug my fingernails into my palms, believing the pain
might force my brain to wake up and think what to do.

I had expected more of a fight, and when the conversation went straight down the road
this way it took me a minute to think what to say next.

By the grace of some miracle I surely did not yet
deserve, I managed to wobble off the highway all in one piece and find a service station.

I threw the soggy shirt in the sink to
soak.

Believe me in those days the girls were dropping by the wayside like seeds off a
poppyseed bun and you learned to look at every day as a prize.

It’s a sight for sore eyes.

But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a fence, I had this feeling about what
Newt’s whole life was going to amount to, and I felt sorry for him.

I suppose you could say
I had some part in choosing this name, but there was enough of destiny in it to satisfy me.

I sat in the
parking lot looking out over that godless stretch of nothing and came the closest I have
ever come to cashing in and plowing under.

She was fighting and cursing, though, and clearly a far
cry from dead.

I learned to look in a microscope at red blood cells, platelets they are
called though they aren’t like plates but little catchers’ mitts, and to count them in the
little squares.

You could smell leaves rotting
into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet
making dents in the surface but never falling through.

Mama had evidently run into
trouble along these lines, at some point in her life with Foster and an Oldsmobile, and she
wanted to be sure I was prepared.

The long, straight
hair and the slender wrist bones.

In our high school days the general idea of fun had been to paint
“Class of ’75” on the water tower, or maybe tie some farmer’s goat up there on
Halloween, but now I had serious intentions.

In my first few years at Pittman County
Hospital I was able to help Mama out with the rent and the bills and still managed to
save up a couple hundred dollars.

She went to the edge of the porch and shook a handful of pea hulls out of her apron
onto the flowerbed.

“You reckon it’s going to fill up tonight?”

When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of blue-gills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb, and the way Mama would carry on you would think I’d caught the famous big lunker in Shep’s Lake that old men were
always chewing their tobacco and thinking about.

From the first moment I
picked it up out of its nest of wet blanket, it attached itself to me by its little hands like
roots sucking on dry dirt.

She had already been through a lot of wild times before she had me, including
one entire husband by the name of Foster Greer.

The sun was headed fast for the flat horizon, and then there would be nothing but
twelve hours of headlights in front of me.

That
is, apart from the pictures on the gas station brochures: Tennessee claimed to be the
Volunteer State, and Missouri the Show-Me State, whatever that might mean, and nearly
everyplace appeared to have plenty of ladies in fifties hairdos standing near waterfalls.

It was
some program about, or from, Oral Roberts University, which I recognized from the
postcards.

You could smell leaves rotting
into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet
making dents in the surface but never falling through.

My engine
was still running from Bob Two Two’s jumper cables, and I hated to let a good start go to
waste, but I was tired and didn’t want to begin a night of driving without a cup of coffee
and something to eat.

I didn’t say anything for a while, and then I told her I would ask Mr. Walter for the job.
第 6 页 共 179 页
http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原版英语阅读网
There wasn’t any sound but Henry Biddle using a hay mower on his front yard, down
the road, and our peas popping open to deliver their goods out into the world.

I tried to recall where I had been at sunup that day.

What she meant was how to handle anything that might come along, I suppose,
because she stood in the road with her arms crossed and watched while I took off all four
tires and put them back on.

“Lucky for you he was a bad shot,” Eddie was telling Jolene as he straightened her arm
out on the table, which I thought to be rude under the circumstances but then that was
Eddie.

Surely you’d think he would have picked one of the Candy Stripers, town girls with
money for the pink-and-white uniforms and prissing around the bedpans on Saturdays
like it was the holiest substance on God’s green earth they’d been trusted to carry.

I had never done anything more interesting for a living
than to help Mama with the for-pay ironing on Sundays and look after the brats of the
people she cleaned for.