Read The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace for Free Online Page B

real chores. We milked the two cows by hand and fed hay to the horses. Bob made spaghetti for dinner and then he led the way down a trail that ran alongside the brook and ended up at the A-frame cabin across the meadow. That’s where we’d sleep best, he said, in the loft there.
    “Turn on the flashlight,” George snapped. “It’s pitch black.”
    “Your eyes will adjust,” said Bob.
    The sky was amazing, packed with stars. I looked up and saw the upside-down
W
. My favorite constellation. I’d learned it in Scouts. “Look, Cassiopeia. I’ve never seen it so bright!”
    “Where?” George asked.
    I pointed.
    Bob said, “Good eye, kid. Caseeoh-pay-ee-ah.” Then he explained. “She was the ancient queen of Ethiopia, you know. She made the mistake of looking at Medusa’s head and was turned to stone. But then the gods forgave her, split her into pieces, and hung her in the sky.”
    “Fuck. They call
that
forgiveness?” George said.
    Bob laughed. “Well, you gotta pay for breaking the rules.” He put down his pack and stepped to the side of the path to pee. He undid the buttons of his fly and looked up. “There’s a million stories up there, you know. The stars can guide you. Save your life.” His piss hit the ground. “Before we went to Nam, my brother and me, we learned to read the sky like a map.” He turned and I could see his eyes on me through the dark. Then his teeth as he smiled and said, “Hey, I’ll give you a book on celestial navigation.”
    I nodded.
    “A shooting star!” George cried.
    I looked up and just caught it, and blinked, wondering if it really happened.
    “That star died a thousand, maybe a million years ago,” said Bob.
    “That’s
bull
, Bob,” George said.
    “No, it’s true. It takes years for light to travel. It’s all . . . already happened.”
    When we got to the cabin, Bob stayed downstairs to build a fire and George and I grabbed our sleeping bags and crawled up the ladder to the loft to get ready for bed. It was cold and dimly lit up there and George said, “Ah, Marsh, you don’t need those dumb pj’s, man. The more naked you are, the warmer. That’s how blood and feathers work, like the Indians did it. Didn’t they teach you that in pansy scouts?”
    I looked down at George’s pink moon of a face poking out of his sleeping bag. “How do you know what the Indians did?”
    “Everyone knows, dummy.”
    I dropped my pajamas and slithered into my down sack. The nylon smelled like campfire, icy against my skin. “Brrrr.” I tightened the drawstring to my neck. “Hey George? What’s Bob
do?
Was he ever a seminarian?”
    “Dunno. He quit, I guess. Does construction. Carpentry.”
    Wind shook the slatted ceiling.
    “He’s cool, isn’t he? I never
knew
there were so many constellations. You know what? He’s gonna give me a book about it. George? Did you really see Pegasus when he pointed to it? George?”
    He was conked.
    I was wide-awake. A truck, driving a tractor, milking a cow. I mean, what a day.
I’ll wear my boots to school on Monday
, I thought.
All muddy. See if Sister Christine or any of the guys notice. I’m a rancher now
.
    The rungs of the ladder creaked. It was Bob, climbing. He burped as his head popped up over the floor.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Hey,” I whispered. I thought the noise would wake George. It didn’t. He was snoring.
    Bob set down a can of Coke and a lantern that had been hooked around his wrist, and then he pulled himself the rest of the way up into the loft. He stood, stooped, really, because he was too big for the place, then picked up the lantern and hooked it to a nail. It swung gently, hissing. A moth was tangled in a cobweb near the nail, its little shadow shifting in the light.
    He hunched over me.
    “George is down for the count, eh?”
    I nodded, amazed at how warm my bag had become, how fast my blood was doing its work. George was right about the Indians.
    I watched as Bob finished off his Coke and started