The Americans Are Coming Read Free Page B

I’m sick, Mom!” Tears, tears, tears.
    “I’m gonna write yer father askin’ him to send me enough money for that cap gun you like in the catalogue. C’mon, Dry darlin’, be a good boy and go to school. I’m not gettin’ any younger, you know. One day I won’t be around to look after you and you’ll need lotsa schoolin’ so’s you kin git a job.”
    “Ah, Mom!” Still more tears.
    “You kin stay home tomorrow, Dry, cause I ain’t got the heart to send you to school on an empty stomach, but you have to go today. C’mon Dryfly darlin’, git dressed, ya still have time.”
    “But I don,’t want to go!”
    “Poor Ninnie didn’t take nothin’ to eat wit’ her. Said you could have it, Dry. Poor little thing was thinking of you and how you’d like a good sandwich. So, c’mon, Dry.”
    Dryfly knew he was defeated, and to make sure that Shirley’s victory would be a difficult one, he cried all the time he was getting dressed. He cried in the kitchen and refused to eat his biscuit and molasses. He was still crying when he crossed the tracks.
    When Hilda Porter opened Shirley Ramsey’s excuse note for Dryfly’s absence on the previous afternoon, it read:
    Deer Mrs. Porter.
    Dryfly stayed home in the afternoon yesterday, for he was sick from rabbit dung poisoning.
    Yours truly,
Shirley
    Hilda Porter already knew.
    Shadrack Nash was not laughing as he watched Dryfly Ramsey enter the school, deposit his excuse on the teacher’s desk and make his way to his seat; the memory of Hilda’s twoinch-wide, foot-long piece of woodcutter strap on his stinging hands took care of that little pleasure.
    Nothing was ever kept secret in Brennen Siding.

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    Shirley watched Dryfly until she was sure he would not run off into the woods.
    “Poor little lad, he’s different from Palidin. Pal’s only a year older, but he’s a lot wiser. Palidin’s smart, wants to be a somebody. Kinda fruity, I’ll admit, but he wants to be somebody. Kin read and write and do ’rithmetic better ’n me. It’s more important to keep Pal in school than Dryfly.”
    Shirley figured that Palidin would eventually get a job as a timekeeper or a store clerk in Newcastle or Chatham. To Shirley, being a timekeeper or a store clerk was having the ultimate good job. Anything more intellectual than these two occupations was beyond comprehension.
    That’s the way it was all over Brennen Siding.
    When Jack Allen went off to Hartford with Dr. MacDowell and eventually became a dentist himself, everybody in the settlement disowned him – disowned him not so much because they didn’t like him, but because Jack had become a different creature – looked different, spoke different, walked different and even smelled different.
    When he came to Brennen Siding and put the word out that he needed a guide to go fishing, none of the local men would guide him. When Stan Tuney took the job out of financial desperation, he found Jack as alien as any other American Sportsman. Jack Allen could have been Nelson Rockefeller sitting in the front of the canoe as far as Stan Tuney was concerned.
    The people of Brennen Siding couldn’t understand foreign places, wealth and formal education, and thought it pretentious to even try.
    When the Connecticut lawyer asked Dan Brennen if theboys fishing across the river were natives, he replied, “No, sir, jist some of us lads.”
    To Dan, a native was a black man from Africa.
    When the locals got together with the American sportsmen they were guiding, the common denominator was humour. Bert Todder did not know that all the food a salmon eats originates in photosynthesis. Bert Todder did not have a hunch that the life and death of algae depended on chlorophyll and its reactions to various colours of the spectrum.
    When the American sport asked Bert why the salmon would not bite while there were bubbles on the river, Bert did not think of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Had he known the existence of such words, he might have had a