A Garden of Earthly Delights Read Online Free PDF Page A

bottle. “Jesus, Walpole. You look like you need this more'n me.”
    Carleton thanked him. Carleton raised the bottle to his mouth, and drank. Swallowing the sweet liquid fire he didn't hear Pearl's screams, so he drank more. Jerking his head to one side and then to the other like a horse trying to shake free his collar. “Naw, keep it,” Franklin said. “You need it more'n me.”
    Kids were running wild, poking sticks through the slats of the hogs' truck. Hog squeals, and a stink of hog panic. Nothing smelled worse than hog shit, not even skunk. For skunk, at a distance, is not a bad smell at all. Only just close up.
    Franklin was saying, “She oughtn't said those hurtful things to me. She oughtn't gotten herself riled up.” But he was sounding repentant, and Carleton could figure he wouldn't drive away and leave them at the side of a country highway in wherever this god-forsaken place was. Arkansas?
Aw-kan-saw
they pronounced it?
    Carleton busied himself with the tow truck after all. Helping with other men to lift the truck out of the ditch, so the tow-truck man could position the hook better, and secure it. Behind, out of sight from this position, where Pearl was lying beneath the tented tarpaulin, thank God there was silence for a while.
    And what if she died? And what if, and back home they would say of him
He's the one who let his wife die. Died having a baby in a drainage ditch in Aw-kan-saw. Him.
He wanted to protest, he had not meant for Pearl to come along with him this time; it was just something that had happened. If she died, he would die, too: he would get hold of a shotgun. Both barrels, you don't know a thing of what hits you. In the mouth, painless. If so he wouldn't have this terrible pressure on him like a tire being pumped up too high. He couldn't remember why he'd had to marry Pearl so bad. Crazy with love for her and she hadn't let him touch her, hardly. That was how she'd been brought up, and Carleton respected it. Vir-gin-ity. He was sure he loved her but love was—it was hard to say what love was— when you were so scared, and your teeth chattering. Maybe he had killed her, pumping himself into her so hard. Like hot molten wax, the stuff that leapt from him. It was an agony to hold it back, hecould not hold it back. If God helped them this one more time, Carleton vowed he would quit this job he'd hired on for and return home, maybe not at once because they needed the money but by August possibly, they could return by Greyhound bus. He would work every minute of every day, do anything, he would get them all back home—Pearl, Sharleen, Mike, the new baby—before it was too late and they never knew they had a home.
    “Carleton? It's a girl! Baby girl.”
    “Carleton, come look!”
    “Carle-ton!”
    The women rushed at him. He was on his knees bawling. The baby born that day in red-clay Arkansas was a girl: they called her Clara, after Carleton's little sister who had died of scarlet fever at the age of four.

2
    Back home in Breathitt County there was a wedding portrait of Carleton Walpole and his bride Pearl: Carleton tall, gangly-limbed yet handsome in his dark serge suit and stiff-collar white shirt, and Pearl standing barely to his shoulder, china-doll-pretty in her white silk-and-lace wedding dress and veil twined about her curled blond hair; both young people gazing intently at the camera as they'd been commanded by the photographer, eyes widened in the effort not to blink. They'd tried so hard, they'd forgotten to smile! The photograph had been taken just after the wedding service, in the anteroom of the church; a harsh winter sunlight had poured through a window, casting them in such clarity Carleton wanted to shield his eyes, looking at it afterward. He was self-conscious about pictures of himself but Pearl was so pretty, he'd liked to look at her. Until one day his mother remarked
Butter wouldn't melt in that one's mouth
and Carleton felt the sting, his mother hinting he'd married a