Darby Read Free Page B

gonna be in one of the papers, I like it all right.”
    “Sounds good,” he said.
    “I just tried to tell the truth. That’s what my friend says newspaper writers do.”
    “The decent ones,” he agreed.
    “That’s the kind I’m gonna be,” I said. I looked at the furry tops of Great-Uncle Harvey’s wrists, which hung over the wooden armrests of his rolling chair. Seeing them reminded me that I’d lied about my granddaddy’s hands. “Great-Uncle Harvey?”
    “Yes, child?”
    “Maybe I gotta say something uncomfortable.”
    “Well, go on and say.”
    I thought about how to make it sound right. “To be honest, I . . . I don’t think your daddy had hands that could’ve been cracked that way? I never saw somebody with hands like that.”
    “Maybe my dreams are wrong?”
    “Maybe they aren’t,” I said. “I just haven’t ever seen it.”
    With a hooked finger, he loosened the collar of his nice shirt. “Fact is, it’s been a long time since I saw anything.”
    “Great-Uncle Harvey,” I whispered, “I didn’t want to tell you, but I thought I should.”
    “I appreciate the truth, Darby.”
    “That’s what newspaper girls gotta do,” I explained.
    “It’s your job,” he agreed, grinning again. Then, as if he wasn’t blind at all, he reached over and squeezed one of my elbows.
    “How’d you know where my arm was?” I asked.
    “Just did. Now go on and let’s keep walking,” he said, waving a hand to get Jacob to push some more.
    That night, after I was excused from dinner, I went downstairs and out the back door to where Jacob was smoking a cigarette in the dark. For some reason, the way he was so quiet made me curious. I stood near the doorway looking at him. Leaning against a tree, he was nearly invisible.
    I said, “See that house way in the field? That’s where one of my best friends lives. Her name’s Evette, and she told me last week I should be a newspaper writer. That’s why tomorrow I’m gonna go tell her that the
Bennettsville Times
is gonna run my story. You know what? I bet she doesn’t believe me, either.” I stared at Jacob, but it didn’t seem like he heard me. “Can you talk?” I asked.
    Jacob studied me so that I got a chill. “Course I can,” he grumbled, and puffed his cigarette.
    “But you don’t ever say anything.”
    He flicked the last part of his cigarette into the dirt. “What should I be saying?”
    “Just stuff.”
    “Child, I save my breath for folks who wansa listen.”
    “Oh.”
    He laughed. “See how me and you don’t have nothing to talk about? I save my breath.”
    I thought for a while. Then I asked, “Do you like pushing around Great-Uncle Harvey?”
    “Better than pickin’ cotton.”
    I said, “He’s real nice.”
    “He nice, but we don’t say nothing.”
    “That’s what it seems like.”
    “That’s what it is,” he said.
    I waited a minute, then told him, “My friend who lives in that house right there is black, and she’s got an aunt and uncle in New York who bought a house and a car.”
    He shook his head. “Up in Maryland, a black man’s got hisself a whole chicken farm.”
    “You know what? Before the other day, I never heard of a black person owning those kind of things.”
    “That’s right,” he said. “You wouldn’t.”
    I watched him light up another cigarette, and just as it got to burning orange, my mama started hollering for me from deep in the house. “Darby! Darby Sinclair Carmichael, it’s time for bed!”
    Looking up at the back of Ellan, it seemed like I could see right through the walls to where Mama was calling for me in the hallway. I said, “I gotta go.”
    “That’s fine, miss,” Jacob answered back.
    When I was wearing a nightgown and ready for bed, I crept downstairs to ask Great-Uncle Harvey if I could write a newspaper story on how he was blind. Slinking through the house, I found him sitting on the back porch with my daddy. Drinking glasses of headache medicine, they weren’t