Autumn Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

crimson blanket as awesome and safe as church, to cover us both.
    But the back stairs were forbidden to me. And my own room, shared with my sister at Grandfather's house, was airy and light, cleaned every morning, with ironed sheets on the sturdy pine beds, and no mystery, no cobwebs, the only shadows those of practical and familiar things.
    "Charles," I said, as we sat on the ground beside the spruce tree, scribbling designs into the dry dirt with twigs, "have you ever been in the woods at the end of Autumn Street?"
    "I don't even know about no woods."
    "Yes, you do. At the end of the street, at the dead end, where all those trees are. Have you ever been in there?"
    Charles was quiet. "You get there on the sidewalk," he said, finally.
    Then I remembered. It was one of the many puzzling rules at Grandfather's house, one of the rules I had questioned, one to which my question had been answered only with the word "Because." "Because why?" drew no answer at all, only a frown. "Because why?" a second time brought banishment to my bedroom.
    When Charles came to visit Tatie, he was not allowed to go to the front of the house. Not indoors, or
out. He had never seen the library, or the parlor, or my bedroom, or any bedroom except Tatie's. I had shown him the dining room once, and the polished silver arranged in the drawers of the mahogany sideboard, but that had been a secret and private excursion into territory forbidden to Charles. He could play only in the kitchen, the laundry room, the pantry with the flower-arranging sink, the back porch, or the backyard inside the fence. Why? Because. Because why? No one would tell me that.
    Charles had never been on the Autumn Street sidewalk that bordered the front of the house. Of course he didn't know about the woods.
    "There are giant turtles in the woods," I told him, hoping to share my fear with a friend. "And caves."
    "Yeah?" Charles looked interested. He drew a turtle in the earth, a turtle with a small straight tail extending from one end of its oval shell, and a pointed head from the other. Four tiny feet, like table legs. "Where
I
live," he said ominously, "there's a train goes through."
    "I've been on lots of trains," I told him arrogantly. "In New York I rode on trains all the time."
    "Not like this one. This one, she's a monster train. She goes through at seven P.M. Hoooie," he said, imitating his mother. "You stand on the track and you get flattened."
    "Nobody stands on train tracks. That's stupid."
    "Look," Charles said. He took from his pocket a flat tarnished disc. "Know what this is?"
    I shook my head.
    "
Now
it's nuthin'. But usta be it was a dime. I put it on the tracks just before she come through at seven P.M. "
    He let me hold it. It was flatter, thinner than the gold dog tag that was now in my mother's jewelry box, now that we were in Pennsylvania where there were no air raids. I could see, faintly, the marks that had once identified it as a dime.
    "Can I keep it?"
    "Nope." Charles took it back, returned it to his pocket. "A guy I know about, he got flattened just like that."
    "I don't believe you."
    Charles shrugged. "Ask Tatie. His name Willard B. Stanton. He comin' home just before seven P.M., he comin' home
drunk
, and he pass out right on them tracks. Whoooosh. Flatten him right out like that dime. They scrape him right up, fold him into a little box, that's how flattened Willard B. Stanton was."
    "Did you
see
him?"
    Charles wanted to lie, I could tell. He was tempted. But he said, "No. But everybody talk about it. Ask Tatie."
    "What's
drunk?
"
    Charles shook his head at me in exaggerated disbelief. "What's
drunk?
" he mimicked. "Elizabeth Jane, you so dumb. You the dumbest person I know."
    "I can read and you can't."
    He ignored that. "
Drunk
" he explained with the same impatient tolerance that my Sunday School teacher often displayed, "is when you drinks a whole mess of dagowine. Then you acts crazy, then you throws up. Or if you Willard B. Stanton, you gets