Read This Tender Land for Free Online Page A

and killing them was the best solution.
    I picked up a stick and poked at the fire. “Any good?”
    “I wouldn’t know,” Albert said. “I didn’t see it.”
    Mose signed, Why not?
    “Right after supper, Mrs. Brickman put me to work washing and waxing her Franklin.”
    “That woman and her cars,” Volz said, and shook his head.
    Every year, Mr. Brickman bought a new car for his wife. In justification, they claimed that it was important she have decent transportation, because she spent a good deal of time driving around and raising funds for the school. Which was true. But it was also true that the lives of the kids at Lincoln School never got any better as a result.
    “She buys herself a slick set of wheels while the children wear shoes no better than cardboard.” Volz waved his hand, the one with only four and a half fingers, toward the general darkness beyond the fire. “Mr. Sparks, he must be turning in his grave.”
    Mr. Sparks was the Black Witch’s first husband. He’d beensuperintendent of the school but had passed away long before Albert and I arrived. Though he’d been dead for years, everyone still spoke of him respectfully. Mrs. Sparks had taken over as superintendent. Shortly after that, she’d married Brickman and her name had changed. I thought it was interesting that both names fit her well. When she was angry, the sparks flew. But when she was quiet, you had the sense that she was just waiting for the right moment to come down on you like a ton of you-know-whats.
    “I hate that witch,” I said.
    “Nobody’s born a witch,” Albert said.
    “What’s that mean?” I said.
    “Sometimes when I’m working for her, after she’s had a drink or two, she lets something else show through, something sad. She told me once that when she was eight years old, her father sold her.”
    “That’s a lie,” I said. “People can’t sell people, especially their own children.”
    “You should read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ” Albert said. “I believed her.”
    “Sold her to a carnival to be part of the spook house, I’ll bet.”
    I laughed, but Albert looked at me seriously. “We lost our dad because he died. Hers sold her, Odie. Sold her to a man who, well, you know what DiMarco does to kids.”
    Which should have made her more like us. But for me, it made her even blacker because if she knew the pain of a strapping—or worse—she should have been more understanding, yet she still delivered kids into the hands of DiMarco.
    “I’ll hate that woman till the day I die.”
    “Careful,” Albert said. “Maybe it’s that kind of hate that’s made her heart so small. And one more thing. When she’s been drinking, I can hear a little Ozark slip in.”
    “You’re saying she’s got some hillbilly in her?”
    “Just like us.”
    We’d been raised in a little town deep in a hollow of the Missouri Ozarks. When we first came to the Lincoln School, we still spokewith a strong Ozark accent. That twang, along with a lot of who we were, had been lost over our years at the school.
    “I don’t believe it,” I said.
    “I’m just saying, Odie, that nobody’s born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.”
    Maybe so, but I still hated her black little heart.
    When the food was ready, Albert set the skillet on a flat rock, then produced the crusty end of a loaf of dark bread and a tin of lard. He gave us forks, and Mose and I tore the bread apart and slathered the pieces with the lard and dug into the eggs and sausage and potatoes.
    Volz went to the old equipment shed and returned with a corked bottle of clear liquid—grain alcohol, which he’d made himself from his secret still inside the shed.
    He’d built the still with Albert’s help and Albert’s expertise. Long before he began running bootleg liquor for other men, my father had been a moonshiner himself. Growing up, Albert had worked with him constructing many an illegal distillery, a skill in particular demand after the Nineteenth Amendment was