A Garden of Earthly Delights Read Online Free PDF

too-young girl, an immature girl who detracted from his (and the Walpole family's?) dignity.
    Carleton had turned on his heel and walked out of the room. You can love and honor your mother, but goddamn if you're going to tolerate any insult to your wife.
    The photograph that was framed in a gilt sunburst pattern was still on the wall back home, but Pearl had brought along with them a dozen smaller photos from the wedding, hauled from place to place, month after month and eventually year after year amid her things. She liked to look at these on rainy days, and show them to the kids, telling of how beautiful the wedding had been, her sister and her cousins who were bridesmaids, how Brody relatives had driven from Nitro and West Hamlin, in West Virginia, and her mother's relatives from as far away as Portsmouth, Virginia—“On the Atlantic seaboard.” Pearl pronounced
Atlantic seaboard
reverently as if she were speaking of someplace far as the Milky Way.
    Carleton, thumbing through Pearl's things when she wasn't around, stared at these old photos with scorn. Jesus! Him in a monkey suit. And not knowing better than to open his mouth when he smiled, showing those damn teeth. Yet he'd looked pretty good, considering he was only eighteen at the time and hadn't known his ass from a hole in the ground. Like he was staring into the future down one of those blacktop highways into the distance, and not flinching. But Pearl beside him was leaning into him as the photographer directed, her arm linked through his in a formal way nobody ever stood in real life. “Goddamn bastard.” Carleton meant the photographer, who had his so-called studio in Hazard. Acted like he was a big deal, charging a low fee for hillbillies that couldn't afford “premier” paper stock.
    Hell, Carleton wasn't going to cry. Maybe it was sad that the young people in the picture no longer existed, but what really hurt was him, Carleton, not being able to get back to that place: a few miles from his father's farm that was hundreds of miles away from where Carleton was now. At night before he sank into an exhausted sleep like a stone sinking through murky water he had to endure the flash of rows of beans or strawberries or sweet corn that made his fingers twitch before he'd be surprised by a circle of warmly smiling faces, adult faces of his family and relatives when he'd been a boy; and his dream might open up (the walls melting away like in a motion picture) to show him the vegetable garden, and the pear orchard, the barnyard with its old rotting rich-smelling haystack, and the hay barn itself—everything! All he'd lost. And his eyeswould ache with the knowledge that he could not push through the density of sleep to get to this place.
    He was too shamed to return. He had never repaid the money he owed, only just sending a few dollars at some time like Christmas, then ceasing. For a terrible time—a long season of drought, crops withered in the fields and fruit never matured in the orchards— Carleton and Pearl and the kids had to live in a derelict old hotel in Cincinnati, till at last their luck changed, and the “picking” trucks came in again, and they were saved. For another season at least.
    It was a way to get by. You didn't save anything except pennies doing farm-hire work but there it was, and there was a comfort in it, in a way. Like eating the same food each day is a comfort, not only you don't have to think but your teeth, chewing, don't have to think nor your stomach digesting it. And the more kids you had old enough to make themselves useful, the better; not like factory work where some kind of child-labor laws ruled against you.
    Early on, when they'd talked all the time of going back home, it was harder. Everything is harder if you compare
what is
with
what was.
That first summer in New Jersey they'd had Sharleen, put the infant down at the end of each row wrapped in a blanket in a box, so Pearl could check her and nurse her as they worked.