Knockemstiff Read Free Page B

they’d do it all over. And Lord, though my family never was one for religion, the first time I heard those words coming out of their mouths like that, they cut me near as bad as the ones my old man called me the night I left his house for good. I started to get up and come out from behind the bushes, figuring if I let them know I was around, they’d run on home and maybe think twice about what they’d been doing. But then I didn’t, and the longer I laid there and watched them, the more I talked myself into believing that they’d just found their own little way of praying, and that maybe they really did want the Savior or even somebody else to come down and wipe away their sins.
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    W HEN I TOOK OFF THAT TIME TO GO HIDE UP ON THE flats from the military, the old man wouldn’t allow me to take nothing but the bibs I was wearing and my old mackinaw and that penknife. I went awful hungry those three years, and I got used to that empty feeling eating away at my insides, which I know ain’t nearly as bad as some of the feelings people carry around with them. I mostly lived on field corn and what squirrels and rabbits I could knock in the head and the sunfish and crawdads I scooped up out of Black Run. In the winter, I stayed in a tepee I made out of corn shocks, and in the good weather I slept underneath a briar patch or else back in this hollow log that laid up behind Harry Frey’s orchard. Once in a while, I’d slip down to the holler in the middle of the night and go to my family’s house. My mother would keep a watch out for me and leave me some biscuits in a poke behind the smokehouse and maybe a piece of meat if there was any. Looking back on it, I guess I can recall only one time in my life when I knew what it was like to have a full belly, and that was just a few years ago when Maude gave me a big roll of old-fashioned bologna she thought was going bad. She said maybe I could feed it to the stray beagle dog that was following me around at the time, but I bought a loaf of bread and took it back to the school bus and ate the whole damn thing myself before I got sick. It must have took a month for me to get over that, and I ain’t never been able to eat more than just a little bit since.
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    I CREPT UP CLOSER TO THE BANK, AND PRETTY SOON I WAS near enough that the water splashed on me whenever those kids did their little dance. It was a beautiful sight, the way the sunlight floated down through the sycamore trees on that young girl and turned everything she did into something sweet and golden. I felt myself growing hard against the ground through my old bibs, and I guess watching her push back and forth on her brother made me all light-headed. I remember holding that dead copperhead up to my lips and kissing it the same way I’d seen men kiss their women in their bedrooms at night. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was because of the things I was seeing, but all of a sudden it seemed as if everything inside me started swirling around like a storm cloud.
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    I ’D BEEN HIDING UP ON THE FLATS FOR ABOUT A YEAR WHEN I came down to the holler one night hoping to get some biscuits and my family was gone. The old house was empty, and somebody had pulled all the windows out and took the doors right off the hinges. They’d left a letter in the smokehouse that said my little brother Bill had been killed on some island out in the ocean and that they’d gone back to Kentucky, which is where my old man was from before. I didn’t even know my brother was in the army until I read that letter, and he couldn’t have been much older than Truman Mackey when he got himself killed. I stood there looking at my sister’s handwriting and wishing they’d taken me with them, but the old man had always favored Bill over the rest of us, and I guess it made him sad that he lost the youngest instead of me. I never saw them again, and after that, I never could get rid of that feeling that