This Tender Land Read Free Page A

run a nit comb through what hair was left to her. As they did with so many of the new kids, they’d stripped off her shabby clothing and washed her all over with kerosene and put her in the uniform dress of the school. She hadn’t spoken much English then and had hardly ever smiled. In my years at Lincoln, I’d come to understand that this was not unusual for kids straight off the reservation.
    But now she did smile, shyly, as she set the bowl on a table for me, then brought out a spoon.
    “Thanks, Donna,” I said.
    “Thank Mr. Volz,” she said. “He argued with Mrs. Peterson. Told her it was a crime to make you work without food in your belly.”
    Volz laughed. “I had to promise to make her a new rolling pin in my carpentry shop.”
    “Mrs. Brickman won’t like this,” I said.
    “What Mrs. Brickman don’t know won’t hurt her. Eat,” Volz said. “Then I take you out to Bledsoe.”
    “Donna?” It was a woman’s voice calling from the kitchen. “No dawdling.”
    “You better go,” Volz advised.
    The girl shot me one last enigmatic look, then vanished into the kitchen.
    Volz said, “You eat, Odie. I’ll go make nice with Mrs. Peterson.”
    When we were alone, Albert said, “What the hell were you thinking? A snake?”
    I began to eat my hot cereal. “I didn’t do it.”
    “Right,” he said. “It’s never you. Christ, Odie, you just took a step closer to leaving Lincoln.”
    “And wouldn’t that be terrible.”
    “You think reformatory would be better?”
    “Couldn’t be any worse.”
    He gave me a steely-eyed glare. “Where’d you get the snake?”
    “I told you, it wasn’t me.”
    “You can tell me the truth, Odie. I’m not Mrs. Brickman.”
    “Only her servant.”
    That one got to him and I thought he was going to slug me. Instead he said, “She takes her singing seriously.”
    “She’s the only one who does.” I smiled, remembering her wild dance when the snake had slithered over her foot. It was a black racer, harmless. If it had been a prank, it would have been a bold one because of the beating that would surely result. Even I would have thought twice about it. I suspected the creature had simply found its way in from outside the dining hall by accident. “I bet she wet her bloomers. Everybody thought it was funny.”
    “But you’re the one who got the strapping and spent the night with Faria. And now you’ll be working Bledsoe’s fields today.”
    “The look on her face was worth it.” That wasn’t exactly true. I knew that by sundown I’d regret being blamed for the snake. The welts on my back from the beating DiMarco had given me were still tender, and the hay dust and the salt from my own sweat would make the wounds hurt even worse. But I didn’t want Albert, that smug know-it-all, to see me worry.
    My brother was sixteen then. He’d grown tall and lanky at Lincoln School. He had dull red hair that was plagued by a perpetual cowlick in back, and like most redheaded people, he freckled easily. In summer, his face was a rash of splotches. He was self-conscious about his appearance and thought of himself as odd-looking. He tried to make up for it with his intellect. Albert was the smartest kid I knew, thesmartest kid anybody at Lincoln School knew. He wasn’t particularly athletic, but he was respected for his brains. And he was honorable to a fault. It wasn’t something in his genes, because me, I didn’t give a crap about what Albert called ethics, and our father had been a bit of a con man. But my brother was stone hard when it came to doing the right thing. Or what he saw as the right thing. I didn’t always agree with him on that point.
    “Where are you working today?” I asked between spoonfuls of cereal.
    “Helping Conrad with some machinery.”
    That was another thing about Albert. He was handy. He possessed a mind that could wrap itself around a technical problem that had others scratching their heads. His work assignment was often with Bud Conrad,