Read Songs in Ordinary Time for Free Online

waving that woman’s check around, but I didn’t, did I? Not only that, but I went and paid bail. I sat outside all night. All night long, waiting for the courthouse to open. I could’ve run, but I didn’t! I could’ve told them it was Luther that changed them figures, but—”
    “No, you couldn’t!” Earlie cried, and stamped his foot in outrage. “’Cause Luther don’t read and Luther don’t write!” He gestured angrily and his palm flashed white in the sun. “You was the one that changed them checks and the old man damn knows it now. Just like he knows they ain’t no black old folks’ home, and they ain’t no Stankey Magazine Company, Incorpor-ated. They’s all lies you made up, just like them Bibles we been giving, half the pages empty and no damn good, like you, Duvall!” The young man moved closer. “And I bet none of them subscriptions ever once came to them people. ’Cause you kept all that money, didn’t you? And no five dollars neither. Ever’ check for five we brung back you changed to fifty, didn’t you?
    Didn’t you?” he snarled, hunching closer.
    “Now you just settle down,” the white man sputtered. “You’re makin’ a mighty big commotion outta one desperate little incident,” he said, 18 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS
    sidestepping; and so did the young man, in a rippling crouch, shoulder muscles taut beneath his bright red-and-yellow diamond-patterned shirt, every step pacing the white man’s, another step, and another, until they were directly below the boy, whose gaze fixed in horror on the blade in the young man’s hand. Just then, there came the high-pitched squeal of a rooting sow. The young man’s head jerked up and his yellow-shot eye snagged on the boy’s thin face peering down through the pale willow leaves. And in that instant of hesitation, the white man, seeing his chance, pivoted, then sprang toward the pine woods, toward the pig farm. The young man wheeled after him, and then they were both gone. And so was the boy, back down the hill, and through the woods, his heart pumping his heavy wet feet until they met pavement, one street over from his own.
    B enjy sat on his sagging back steps with six-year-old Louis Klubock, who lived next door. It had been a terrible day, but he felt safe now in this naked heat with chubby Louie beside him and the Klubocks’ old black Lab dozing at their feet. Delicate music drifted across the driveway from the open windows of the newly painted yellow house as Mrs. Klubock played the piano and sang in a high sweet voice. Sometimes when Mr.
    Klubock joined in, Benjy’s heart would almost split in two with joy and longing. Mr. Klubock was at work now in the butcher shop. Louie was lucky. He had everything.
    “My uncle Renie used to have a dog,” Benjy said, reaching down to pet Klubocks’ dog. “His name was Riddles. My mother said my aunt poisoned him. But Uncle Renie said he just took off. He’s got a cat now in his store.
    But it’s a secret cat. Nobody knows about him.”
    Benjy knelt down and scratched the white ruff on the dog’s chest. The dog rolled onto its side.
    “I like cats,” Louie said.
    “We had one once, a kitten, a little white one.”
    “Yah, I remember that,” Louie said. “Your mother brought him home and then she took him away. How come she did that?”
    “I don’t know.” Careful . With so much not to tell, so many feints and dodges, and all the bobbing and weaving, he could feel his brain become this fluid, slippery, shimmying mass behind his eyes. “She says cats are the worst pets of all.” He continued scratching the dog’s chest. “She says they’re just like people. All they care about’s themselves. She says boy cats are the worst, ’cause they’re just like men, staying out all night and getting into fights and dragging home in the morning just to have a place to sleep.”
    Klubocks’ dog got up then and lifted a leg and wet on the foundation. Its yellow stream trickled down the