A Land More Kind Than Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

listened to his footsteps as he walked down the center aisle toward the door. I heard him open it up and step outside, and when he did my eyes sensed the explosion of light the door let in even though I had them closed just as tight as I could. He was outside, but I stayed froze just like that until I heard the sound of his car engine revving; I still didn’t move when I heard him pull out onto the road and head out toward the highway. Once I was sure he was gone, I opened my eyes and tried to look around to get my bearings, but the light from the door was gone, and I knew my eyes would have to fix themselves against the blackness that had once again taken over the church.

Jess Hall

T WO
    I FOLLOWED J OE B ILL FARTHER DOWN THE RIVERBANK THAN we’d ever gone before. We stopped at the bridge and came up a new path from the river through the bright morning sunlight and crossed the road toward the woods on the other side. We walked along the railroad tracks where you could smell the dusty ties getting baked dry in the heat, and then we went into the trees and crawled through briars and over rotten limbs and didn’t say a word to each other until we stood in the shade on the edge of the woods and stared across the field at the back of the church.
    It was so hot that my hair and my shirt were soaked through with sweat, and I figured that if I told somebody I’d just been baptized in the river with all my clothes on, they would’ve believed it. I could feel that sweat running down my legs beneath my blue jeans, and I knew it would start itching me when it dried. I untucked my shirt and wiped my face, and then I tucked it back inside my jeans because Mama had told us over and over that we’d better keep our shirts tucked in while we were at church, especially on Sunday mornings. She always said Joe Bill’s mama didn’t care one bit about what he looked like at church, and I reckon she was right, because he’d untucked his shirt and unbuttoned some of its buttons too. He reached up and grabbed a tree limb and pulled it down and held on to it. I looked around for a limb that I could pull down and hold on to too, but there wasn’t any that I could reach. Joe Bill was eleven and I was nine, and that meant he wasn’t just two years older than me, he was two years taller too.
    I watched a hot breeze come across the field and move through the high grass on its way to us. I looked over at Joe Bill as the breeze pushed his cowlick off his forehead. His hair was blond, but in the shade it looked almost as brown as mine because it was wet from him sweating so much. He looked over at me, and then he looked back toward the field.
    â€œIt’s right there,” he said, nodding toward the back of the church.
    I looked across the field, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking at because I hadn’t ever been behind the church before. Up front it had big windows that somebody had covered over from the inside with newspapers so long ago that they’d been turned yellow from the sun. There was only one window around the back of the church, and it had a rusted old air conditioner sitting up inside it.
    â€œRight there,” Joe Bill said. He raised his hand and pointed his finger out across the field to where that air conditioner hung out of the window. There were some rotten-looking boards blocking in the sides of it, but it almost looked like it might be too heavy for them boards to hold it up in there. “You see it?” Joe Bill asked.
    â€œI see it,” I told him. He looked over at me again, and then he took a step closer like somebody might’ve been watching us and he was afraid they’d hear what he was about to tell me next.
    â€œThere’s gaps in between them boards and the window frame,” he said. “If you get up close enough, you can see right in there.”
    I looked at that air conditioner, and even though I couldn’t hear it from