Bitter in the Mouth Read Online Free PDF

a GED and no baby, a bundle of pink flesh that she left over the state line for her aunt to raise. Kelly then enrolled in Gardner-Webb Baptist College, where all the young men were future deacons of their congregations and all the young women were virgins with a lowercase v . I had graduated valedictorian of the BSHS class of 1986 and was already a world away in New Haven.
    Our letters have never stopped. Anger, disappointment, and shame at times have slowed their comings and goings, but we understood, without really fully understanding, that the words that we wrote to each other couldn’t have existed in speech. The white paper—we both had switched to thin airmail paper by the age of fourteen—was for us the cover of night. We wished, without knowing it, that we loved each other, that we wanted to touch each other’s bodies. That way we could write to each other all the sweet things that we wanted whispered in our ears by the boys, dumb and cruel, who had so suddenly replaced DP as our beautiful mystery.

M Y FATHER’S UNHAPPINESS WAS A PIECE OF FINE MESH IN HIS throat which all of his words had to push past with some care. Because Thomas Hammerick had lived in the South for most of his life, no one around him took notice of the slightly slowed rhythm of his speech. When he was older, people thought of the pauses between his words as evidence of his sound judgment.
    What I wanted to know was who placed the scrim there. My father wouldn’t have acknowledged this as a question. He believed that he alone was responsible for the hills and vales of his emotions. That was in part the reason for his unhappiness. The other parts came from his firm belief in the existence of the Reasonable Man. I was introduced to the Reasonable Man (and recognized him immediately as my father) during my first year of law school. The Reasonable Man was a legal standard that was once evoked with much frequency by the courts to weigh the actions or inactions of the rest of us. Would the Reasonable Man sign a contract without ever reading a word of it? Would the Reasonable Man leave a young child at home unsupervised? Would the Reasonable Man kill his wife in the rage of seeing her naked in another man’s arms?
    In many ways, the Reasonable Man standard was the juristic analog to the question posed today on billboards and bumper stickers by fundamentalist Christians: What would Jesus do?
    Jesus and the Reasonable Man often had the same response. But there were points of divergence, which were dutifully respected, thanks to the constitutional firewall between Church and State. The Reasonable Man, for instance, would have answered, “Hell, yes!” to the third question. Thus, his love-scorned, emasculated rage was at one time acknowledged by many courts as a mediating factor, which would lessen his culpability and his jail time for blowing his wife’s brains to bits. The Reasonable Man, of course, wouldn’t witness a scene of marital betrayal, walk away, and return a couple of hours later with a loaded gun. That would imply premeditation, which would cancel out the value (to him) of a mediating circumstance. A truly Reasonable Man apparently always packed heat, which would be immediately available to him should he be spurned and, in that unthinking instance, commit his crime of passion. When I was first introduced to him, I immediately understood that the Reasonable Man wasn’t an ideal husband.

    When I was eight years old, I thought my father was one of the men on TV who met with prisoners in windowless rooms and advised them to “cut a deal,” which I thought was a procedure involving a very large knife. Justice, a small bronze statue on my father’s desk, held a scale. I thought she could have other utensils as well. When I was eleven and reading To Kill a Mockingbird , I thought my father was Atticus Finch. That meant I was Scout. That meant my mother was beautiful but dead, and my great-uncle Harper could be my older brother, Jem. When