Tears Are for Angels Read Free

leave them."
        "You take 'em this time. That's all I have."
        "God." She put her head over on one side and looked at me for a long time. "Beans and corn whisky. Is that good for your digestion?"
        I walked away from her, toward the house.
        "Speaking of corn whisky," I said, "won't you join me?"
        She was just behind me.
        "If I have to stay here," she said, "you keep off of that stuff."
        I swung around and she almost bumped into me. I closed my fingers about her arm and I jerked her up against me and the brown eyes widened and her lips parted.
        "All right," I said. "I didn't ask you to get yourself stuck out here. But you're here and you might as well get this straight. These funny cracks about me don't go. I was doing all right till you stuck your nose in, and I'll do all right when you drag your can out of here, which can't be too soon for me. So keep that damn tongue off of me. Just keep that sass to yourself."
        Her face was up close to mine, the brown eyes and the red lips, and suddenly I jerked at her again and bent my lace to hers. Her free hand came against the side of my face with a stinging wallop and I let her go and we both stepped back.
        "And you get this straight," she said. "You keep that filthy hand off me. If you even get those stinking whiskers close to me again I'll let you have it where it hurts the most."
        There was a pure, undefiled fury in her voice that told me that she meant it and that she would know how to do it. The brown eyes snapped at me and the words stung right into my ribs.
        "Fair enough," I said, and walked away from her toward the spring. "The goddamn beans are in the house when you want 'em."
        I walked on, my back to her, but I could feel her watching me. I sat down by the spring, and in a minute she went on into the shack.
        Vague worry filled me. She wants something, I thought, she's out here for some reason, and it couldn't be anything else but that. But she couldn't know. Nobody knows.
        I leaned over and looked at myself in the still, clear water. The wild beard hung to my chest and my hair had not been combed in days. The tattered collar of the faded shirt was twisted unevenly at my neck.
        All right, I thought, I'm no beauty queen. I never was. Let her just keep her damn mouth off of me, is all.
        The water looked back at me silently. I let my hand trail in it and then I quickly looked over my shoulder. She was still in the shack. I took my hand out of the water and ran it through my hair and looked back into the spring.
        So I'm still no beauty queen. So what?
        And then a tide of shame flowed over me and I shut my eyes tightly and leaned back against one of the trees that grew by the spring. Memory rolled up out of the part of me I had locked away and my head began to ache.
        Memory narrowed, for no reason at all, and my mind closed in on a Sunday, a shell-pink day when all of the world had been in tune and there hadn't been the face swimming in my brain or the loneliness or the dirt or the despair. It had been our last Easter together, over two years ago.
        I had come out on the wide, rambling porch of the house and stood there a moment, waiting for Lucy, looking out across the rich rolling fields that were mine, and I had smelled spring and inside of me something was smiling. Somewhere a bird sang. There were no cars roaring by, no trains whistling and rumbling, no noises at all but the bird and the sound a spring breeze makes in pine trees.
        The door opened behind me and I heard her step. I turned quickly and she was pinker, more beautiful than the day, and I went to her and held out my two hands and she took them, smiling. We stood there looking at each other and I was proud of my wife.
        "Let me look at you," she said. That was the way she had been. My clothes had always had to be just right, and she had almost