A home at the end of the world Read Online Free PDF

cherub’s girlish shoulder. What I find is Carlton on the ground with his girlfriend, in an uncertain jumble of clothes and bare flesh. Carlton’s jacket, the one with the embroidered eye, is draped over the stone, keeping watch.
    I hunch behind the statue. I can see the girl’s naked arms, and the familiar bones of Carlton’s spine. The two of them moan together in the dry winter grass. Though I can’t make out the girl’s expression, Carlton’s face is twisted and grimacing, the cords of his neck pulled tight. I had never thought the experience might be painful. I watch, trying to learn. I hold on to the cherub’s cold wings.
    It isn’t long before Carlton catches sight of me. His eyes rove briefly, ecstatically skyward, and what do they light on but his brother’s small head, sticking up next to a cherub’s. We lock eyes and spend a moment in mutual decision. The girl keeps on clutching at Carlton’s skinny back. He decides to smile at me. He decides to wink.
    I am out of there so fast I tear up divots. I dodge among the stones, jump the gully, clear the fence into the swing-set-and-picnic-table sanctity of the back yard. Something about that wink. My heart beats fast as a sparrow’s.
    I go into the kitchen and find our mother washing fruit. She asks what’s going on. I tell her nothing is. Nothing at all.
    She sighs over an apple’s imperfection. The curtains sport blue teapots. Our mother works the apple with a scrub brush. She believes they come coated with poison.
    “Where’s Carlton?” she asks.
    “Don’t know,” I tell her.
    “Bobby?”
    “Huh?”
    “What exactly is going on?”
    “Nothing,” I say. My heart works itself up to a humingbird’s rate, more buzz than beat.
    “I think something is. Will you answer a question?”
    “Okay.”
    “Is your brother taking drugs?”
    I relax a bit. It is only drugs. I know why she’s asking. Lately police cars have been browsing our house like sharks. They pause, take note, glide on. Some neighborhood crackdown. Carlton is famous in these parts.
    “No,” I tell her.
    She faces me with the brush in one hand, an apple in the other. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” She knows something is up. Her nerves run through this house. She can feel dust settling on the tabletops, milk starting to turn in the refrigerator.
    “No,” I say.
    “Something’s going on,” she sighs. She is a small, efficient woman who looks at things as if they give off a painful light. She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and spent her girlhood tying up bean rows, worrying over the sun and rain. She is still trying to overcome her habit of modest expectations.
    I leave the kitchen, pretending sudden interest in the cat. Our mother follows, holding her brush. She means to scrub the truth out of me. I follow the cat, his erect black tail and pink anus.
    “Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you,” our mother says.
    I keep walking, to see how far I’ll get, calling, “Kittykittykitty.” In the front hall, our father’s homemade clock chimes the half hour. I make for the clock. I get as far as the rubber plant before she collars me.
    “I told you not to walk away,” she says, and cuffs me a good one with the brush. She catches me on the ear and sets it ringing. The cat is out of there quick as a quarter note.
    I stand for a minute, to let her know I’ve received the message. Then I resume walking. She hits me again, this time on the back of the head, hard enough to make me see colors. “Will you stop ?” she screams. Still, I keep walking. Our house runs west to east. With every step I get closer to Yasgur’s farm.
    Carlton comes home whistling. Our mother treats him like a guest who’s overstayed. He doesn’t care. He is lost in optimism. He pats her cheek and calls her “Professor.” He treats her as if she were harmless, and so she is.
    She never hits Carlton. She suffers him the way farm girls suffer a thieving crow, with a grudge so old and endless