Anybody Shining Read Online Free PDF Page B

fret,” I told him. “You’ll be plenty safe here from all cats and wild things. Mountain lions don’t prowl in the hollers. And if’n you do see one, just run away as fast as you can.”
    Tom looked shaky. “I can’t run very fast. In fact, I can hardly run at all.”
    â€œDon’t matter none,” Harlan said, trying his best to sound reassuring. “Them cats are faster than us anyhow. You see one, you’re licked from the get-go.”
    Tom did not look cheered by the news, but he give us a wave and said, “You better go before it’s completely dark. I’ll see you tomorrow, on this spot.”
    â€œThis very one,” I agreed.

    Oh, and didn’t we do just as we said, and didn’t Harlan give us such a scare! But not one more word about it until I hold yourletter in my hand and read the very words of your pen. I am sad to take such drastic measures, Cousin Caroline, but I feel you have been silent for far too long.
    Signed,
    Your Awaiting Cousin,
    Arie Mae Sparks

Dear Cousin Caroline,
    I have waited eagerly to hear from you after my last letter. Mama asked just this morning if you had wrote, and I was sorry to tell her no, not one word, and I wondered why not. “Maybe I should stop writing her if she ain’t interested,” I said.
    But Mama said that was not the way. She said to keep writing you, and one day you would write back. “You’ve got to stay the course once you’ve started down the path, Arie Mae,” she told me. “It is far too soon to give up. I once made the mistake of giving upon someone too soon, and I have lived to regret it.”
    I asked Mama what she meant by that, but she just shook her head and handed me a pencil.
    So I am not giving up on you, Cousin Caroline. I believe you will write me back, and I’m going to keep writing you until you do. But I am not going to tell you about how Harlan Boyd almost got murdered in the Ghost Cave BY A GHOST on Tuesday evening last until I hear from you, just as I said would be the case.
    However, it is now Friday morning and my hand’s itching to write something. Miss Sary says she has never met one such as me who is so eager to put words down on paper. I told her it’s because writing things down straightens out my thinking and is almost as good as having a friend to tell all my secrets to.
    So I will tell you the story of Harlan Boyd and his mama who left him to live all by hisself up in their cabin on Cane Creek.Harlan’s mama is named Earlene Boyd, and she’s the same age as Miss Sary, which means she weren’t but a young girl when she got married to Willis Boyd and had herself a baby. Everybody said it was a blessing she got married young, as she had hair the shiny black of a crow’s wing and was known to be overfull of life, which is to say she was as wild as a rabbit in the fields.
    But why you would marry yourself someone as worthless as Willis Boyd is still a topic of conversation in these parts, even though no one has seen the man since the day Miss Earlene told him she was going to have a baby. Willis Boyd did not want a baby and made himself as scarce as scarce can be the minute he found out he was going to get himself one.
    It is a sad but true fact that Harlan has never once laid eyes on his daddy.

    So Miss Earlene and Harlan lived by themselves in a falling-down cabin on Cane Creek.It got to be a habit with some folks to leave a little of what they had extra on the cabin’s front steps. You could knock and knock all you wanted, but Miss Earlene would never answer, even if she was standing right there on the other side of the door, even if the person knocking was her own best friend, Wanda Coffey, which often it was.
    For a long time, no one ever did see Harlan, and some said that there weren’t a child at all up in that cabin with Earlene. They said she’d made a boat out of bark and twigs and sailed her baby down