Read Blood of Vipers for Free Online

to Oma. She agreed. It was
     time. The doctor
     made her some warm milk and—”
    “You poisoned her? Are you serious? You
     murdered grannie?
     What’s wrong with you people?”
    “It was the kindest way, you must understand.
     In Silesia, my
     aunt stayed behind with her children. She had too many nice
     things, and she
     said she wasn’t going to let the dirty Russians have them. But
     when they came—”
    “And your pops was reading scriptures like it
     was a proper
     Christian burial. What would the priest say about that? Isn’t
     murder—suicide,
     whatever—against the church?”
    She fell silent.
    Cal thought about the daisies on the
     nightstand, and
     imagined someone taking the care to cut them, and place them
     just so in a vase. Look at these, Grandma, while you drink your milk. There,
     doesn’t that feel
     better? Get some rest, now.
    He felt on the verge of hysteria. It was like
     he’d fallen
     into a nest of poisonous snakes, and they were all biting him,
     their venom
     burning through his veins, but he couldn’t so much as climb out
     of the blasted
     pit. Dammit, he couldn’t take any more of this.
    “You’re all out of your minds,” he said.
     “That’s it, I’m
     gone. Owf feeterzayn, or however you say it. Give the Führer a
     goodnight kiss
     for me, will you?” He snatched up the Russian rifle and turned
     to go.
    They surrounded him, grabbed at his sleeve
     and wrist.
    “ Nein, nein, ” Helgard pleaded.
    “ Helfen
     Sie uns,
     bitte ,” Hans-Peter said.
    “Cal, please, I beg you,” Greta said. “Two
     brothers are
     dead, my other brother missing. My aunt murdered by Russians,
     and with her
     children. My other grandparents vanished after the Hamburg
     bombing. If you
     leave us, the same thing will happen to us. Please, try to
     understand. We are
     desperate. Do you know what that means?”
    Two days earlier he would have said yes, of
     course he knew
     about desperation. Now, he was not so sure.
    It wasn’t like he’d skated through life; the
     Jameson family
     had fallen on hard times in the Great Depression. In 1930, after
     his father
     lost his job as an accountant, he’d pitched around for
     work—somewhere,
     anywhere. In late December, with four mouths to feed, Father
     grasped at a
     letter from a cousin working the rail yards in Carbon, Utah, who
     promised him a
     job shoveling coal. Six months earlier, Papa might have scoffed
     at such a
     low-paying, backbreaking job, but hunger had a way of clarifying
     one’s
     priorities. They scraped together their last few dollars, bought
     train tickets
     for Utah, and carried with them only two steamer trunks of
     clothing and
     possessions.
    Except when they arrived, the job was gone
     and half the
     other jobs in Utah coal country as well, throwing hundreds of
     men into the soup
     kitchen lines. Papa’s cousin himself had lost his job, but being
     single, he
     took the hobo route to return east and move back in with his
     parents. The
     Jamesons, on the other hand, had no money; they were stuck in
     the dry hills of
     Utah coal country, where the only work was the railroad or the
     mines, and
     neither was hiring.
    One of Cal’s sharpest memories was a scrawny
     kid in
     elementary school showing him that if you tied a rock to the
     inside of your
     belt and cinched it up real tight you wouldn’t feel so hungry.
     It helped pass
     the morning until the free food the churches handed out at
     lunch—a cup of
     chicken broth from the Greek Orthodox and a peanut butter
     sandwich from the
     Mormons.
    There were a lot of rocks under belts that
     year. And the
     next.
    But that was what, a dozen years ago?
     Eventually the mines
     started hiring again and Papa got a job, first underground,
     where he’d emerge
     with a face like a minstrel in blackface, and then above ground
     tallying
     shipping tonnages. They were poor, but fed. Every other trouble
     in Cal’s life
     since then amounted to a minor annoyance