A Bird On Water Street Read Online Free PDF

hire Eli. It’s a team down there. Those men gotta be able to trust you. One man not paying attention to what the rock is sayin’ puts everybody in danger.” He pointed his fork at me. “But don’t you worry, Jack. You’re my son. You’re made of the right stuff and you’ll make a damned fine miner.”
    “Ray, will you just stop?” Mom glared at him until he sighed and went back to his dinner.
    I knew I should have been flattered by what he said. He’d dropped out of high school to take care of his family when Grandfather Hicks died in the collapse and had moved up quickly, despite never getting his high school diploma.
    “Hard work will get you anywhere,” he’d say.
    But he never bothered to ask me what I wanted to do, which was pretty much anything other than mining. “Do you even care what I think?” I wanted to yell. Did it matter to him? But how could I tell my dad that I didn’t want his life?
    I couldn’t move my fork. Who knew you could get a stomachache from macaroni and cheese?
    Mom looked at me with her forehead all wrinkled. “Eat up, Jack. We’ve got to get goin’ to the park.”
    I couldn’t hold onto my bad mood for Music Night—and Hannah would be there!
    r

Chapter 4
    Music Night

    Friday night was music night. Being the last one of the season, nearly everybody in town would be gathered at the river park in Georgia for bluegrass.
    Coppertown sat right at the intersection of Polk County in Tennessee and Fannin County in Georgia. Cherokee County in North Carolina was just a stone’s throw away too. In fact, the Tennessee-Georgia state line ran right through the parking lot of the Company store.
    Piran and I had stood with a foot in each state many a time. It made me feel like I’d been around, which I hadn’t.
    We caught up with Grandpa Chase as we walked down to the park with our folding chairs. Dad and I helped him unload some coolers from his truck. Since Grandpa owned the local Bait ’n Beer, he sold RC Colas and MoonPies for fifty cents during music nights. Course, he couldn’t sell beer over the state line because Fannin was a dry county. And with Sheriff Elder right there, nobody was sneakin’ in anything they shouldn’t.
    Grandpa gave me my cola and MoonPies for free. Sometimes I could wrangle one for Piran too.
    I was just grabbing one for the both of us when his sister swooped by with her pack of girlfriends in a cloud of paisley and pink. I stuttered out a weak, “H-h-hi, Hannah.”
    “Oh, hey Jack,” she said and flowed on by. I focused on setting out a folding chair so nobody would notice my grin. Nothing could keep me down on music night.
    The river kept the air cool as the water flowed by the park in a wide curve. People came down out of the hills, some so wrinkled and bent, you’d swear they were at least 200 years old. And they all brought their instruments with ’em—everywhere you looked there were guitars, banjos, fiddles, basses, mandolins, and dulcimers. Sometimes there were more people making music than listening. For everybody else, it was a good time to catch up on gossip.
    When Grandpa Chase wasn’t sellin’, he was sawing away on his fiddle. Mr. Quinn, Piran’s dad, plucked like wildfire on his claw hammer banjo. A few kids stumbled over their fingering, trying to keep up. Mom sang along to “I’ll Fly Away” and “Rosewood Casket”—I caught Dad looking at her with a goofy expression on his face. If anybody could get his mind off the mine, it was her.
    Old Counce Taylor harmonized with her in his Celtic mountain drawl. When he sang “Angel Band,” he blended all the words together until it was nearly impossible to tell what the words were. Grandpa said he sounded like a bagpipe—that it was the old mountain way of singin’.
    Aunt Livvy and Uncle Bubba danced a few reels. They were so good people said they could win awards. Buster just grumbled, “God, they’re at it again,” and tried not to stand too close.
    Practically the whole