A Heritage of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

afternoons and evenings, the boy began to see a different man, a younger man, shining through the meanness of the older man. Seeing, perhaps, that the shifty-eyed meanness was little more than a mask that he had put on as a defense against old age, which he apparently considered the final great indignity that a man was forced to undergo.
    But not for a great deal longer. In the summer that Tom was sixteen he came home at noon from plowing corn to find the old man fallen from his rocking chair, sprawling on the porch, no longer suffering any indignity other than the indignity of death, if death can be thought of as an indignity. Tom dug the grave and buried him beneath the same oak tree where the mother had been buried, and hauled boulders, smaller boulders this time, for he was the only one left to handle them, to be piled upon the grave.
    â€œYou grew up fast,” said Monty.
    â€œYes,” said Cushing, “I suppose I did.”
    â€œAnd then you took to the woods.”
    â€œNot right off,” said Cushing. “There was the farm, you see, and the animals. I couldn’t run off and leave the animals. They get so they depend on you. You don’t just walk away and leave them. There was this family I had heard of, on a ridge about ten miles away. It was hard scratching there. A poor spring they had to walk to for their water about a mile away. The land stony and thin. A tough clay that was hard to work. They stayed there because there were buildings to give them warmth and shelter, but there wasn’t much else. The house stood there on the ridge, swept by every wind that came along. The crops were poor and they were out where any wandering band could see them. So I went to see the family and we made a deal. They took over my farm and animals, with me getting half the increase from my livestock, if there was any increase and if I ever came back to claim it. They moved down to the coulee and I took off. I couldn’t stay. There were too many memories there. I saw too many people and I heard too many voices. I had to have something to do to keep busy. I could have stayed on the farm, of course, and there’d have been work to do, but not enough work and wondering why I did it and looking at the two graves and thinking back. I don’t believe I reasoned it out at the time. I just knew I had to walk away, but before I went, I had to be sure there was someone to care for the animals. I suppose I could just have turned them loose, but that wouldn’t have been right. They would have wondered what had happened. They get used to people and they sort of count on them. They are lost without them.
    â€œNor do I think I even tried to figure out what I would do once I was free of the farm. I just took to the woods. I was well trained for it. I knew the woods and river. I had grown up with them. It was a wild, free life, but at first I drove myself. Anything to keep busy, to put the miles behind me. But finally I eased off and drifted. I had no responsibility. I could go anywhere I wished, do anything I wished. Over the course of the first year I fell in with two other runners, young twerps like myself. We made a good team. We went far south and roamed around a bit, then we wandered back. We spent some time one spring and summer along the Ohio. That’s good country to be in. But as time went on, we drifted apart. I wanted to go north and the others didn’t. I’d got to thinking about the story my grandfather told about the university and I was curious. From things I’d picked up I knew it was a place where you could learn to read and write and I thought those might be handy things to have. In one tribe down south—in Alabama, maybe, I can’t be sure—I found an old man who could read. He read the Bible mostly and did a lot of preaching. I thought what a fine thing that would be, not the Bible, you understand, nor the preaching, but being able to read.”
    â€œIt must