Read Trouble in July for Free Online Page B

all. He crouched low at the door, turning his head just enough to enable him to watch the lane in both directions. All the cabins along the lane were as dark as the night itself. The whole settlement looked deserted. Sonny wondered as he crouched against the door if the people in the quarters, beside Henry and Vi, had heard anything yet. He decided they did know about his trouble, because he could think of no other reason why the cabins would be dark, even if it was after midnight, and the shutters closed over the windows on a hot summer night.
    “Reach your hand through the crack when I open this door a little,” Henry said, startling him. “Vi couldn’t find nothing except some pieces of cornbread, but that’ll do you for a while. Now take what I’m giving you, and jerk your hand away fast, because I’m going to shut this door right up tight again. Next thing I know you’ll be wanting to come in here and sleep in the bed. Do you hear me, boy?”
    “I hear you, Henry,” he said gratefully.
    He put his hand on the door and waited for the crack to appear. In a moment his hand slipped through the opening Henry had made, and he grasped the bread that was thrust at him. He began eating it in big mouthfuls right away.
    “I ain’t trying to be mean to you, boy,” Henry said insistently. “I’m just trying to make you strike out for them deep woods where you belong. Now, get going! You hear me, boy?”
    “I’m going, Henry,” he promised. “I was just hungry.”
    He left the door, cramming the cornbread into his mouth and swallowing it in painful gulps. When he got to the back of the cabin, he stopped and listened, but there was nothing he could hear. He took one more look in the direction of the cabin where Mammy was, and then he crawled, through the split-rail fence behind Henry’s cabin and started walking across the field towards Earnshaw Ridge.
    Halfway across the first field he suddenly remembered the rabbits. There was a persimmon tree not far away and, crouching, he ran to it. He pressed his body against the trunk of the tree. He thought he could almost see the rabbits half a mile away. They were in a hutch at the back of Mammy’s chicken house.
    He stood under the tree wondering if Mammy would forget to feed them while he was away. She might forget, if she spent her time worrying about him, and they would be shut up with nothing to eat for two or three days, maybe a whole week, if he was away that long. The longer he gazed in the direction of the rabbits, the more troubled he became. Mammy was old and she forgot easily. It hurt him to think of his rabbits shut up in the hutch and dying of starvation.
    He made up his mind to go across the field to the back of the chicken house and feed the rabbits. He walked slowly across the field until he came to the ditch where the tall grass grew. He pulled up grass by the handful and stuffed it into his shirt. When he could not get any more into it, he ran along the side of the fence until he came to the rear of Mammy’s cabin. The chicken house was only a few yards away. He could see the rabbits sitting in the starlight with their twitching noses poked through the mesh-wire. They began hopping around like mad when they saw him climb through the fence and come towards them.
    Sonny stuffed the boxes full of the new green grass and put his hand inside to feel them. The two does sat where they were and let him rub their ears back and run his fingers through their fur. The buck was more cautious. He backed into a corner and stayed there eating grass with one ear raised and one flat on his neck.
    “You sure like to eat, don’t you, Jim Dandy?” he said to the buck, pushing a handful of grass closer. “You keep a man busy just feeding you and nothing else.”
    He had become so absorbed in the spell cast over him by his rabbits that he jumped when he remembered what it was he had to do. He looked around the corner of the chicken house towards the cabin, but the