Build My Gallows High Read Online Free PDF

clearly. Mumsie became something he made up—not a beautiful woman who had put a lead slug in Whit Sterling’s belly. It had taken a good kick in the teeth to bring the true picture into focus.
       
    The night was hot, the sea an unruffled inland lake so smooth you could find stars in it. He lay back in his deck chair looking shoreward at the mountain wall that was Mexico’s west coast. Someone ran along the narrow deck and then she was down on her knees beside him, clinging to him, pressing her face against his chest.
    ‘Oh, Red!’ she cried.
    His fingers touched her neck, moved up through the soft mass of her hair. ‘Yes, Mumsie.’
    ‘I’m afraid.’
    ‘Of what?’
    ‘You won’t come back. You’ll leave me in Los Angeles and you won’t come back.’
    ‘Of course I’ll come back.’
    ‘You mustn’t. I’m no good. I’ll never be any good. Such a black soul, darling.’
    ‘Black velvet,’ Red said. ‘Anyway, I like black souls.’
    ’Right now you do. After a while you’ll start thinking.’
    ‘Who named you Mumsie?’
    ‘A man.’
    ‘Your father?’
    ‘He called me Harriet. Don’t ask about the other.’
    ‘I want to ask. I like to pry into your past. It excites me.’
    Someday it won’t. Someday you’ll start seeing ghosts. Oh, Red, I’ve a secret for you.’
    ‘Say it.’
    ‘I adore you.’
    He found her lips and then the dream began.
    In the night it rained and he heard the rain hitting the deck. Suddenly the tiny cabin was cool. Mumsie asked: ’Who wrote it?’
    ‘Wrote what?’
    ‘You know what. The poem I’m thinking.’
    ‘I’m not a mind reader,’ Red said sleepily. ’How do I know the poem you’re thinking?’
    ‘It goes. “When I am dead and over me bright April shakes down her rain-drenched hair.”’
    ‘Go back to sleep and stop being so cheerful,’ Red said. He turned over away from her and lay there looking at the gray patch that was the window, listening to the rain drop down, listening to the thump of the engines and the slap of the waves against the rusty steel.
    ‘Teasdale,’ Mumsie said.’That’s who wrote it.’
    She put her body tight against his back and he could feel her warm breath on his neck. ‘I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like being dead and having April let her rain-drenched hair down on me. Would you like it. Red?’
    ‘Go to sleep.’
    ‘I wouldn’t have you with me. That’s why I wouldn’t like it.’
    He turned and held her close. ‘How did you happen to read Sarah Teasdale?’
    ‘A man read it to me.’
    ‘The same man who named you Mumsie?’
    ’No.’
    ‘My God!’ Red said. ‘What do you do—collect men?’
    ‘I told you not to pry. Anyway, they don’t matter any more.’
    ‘That’s heartening.’
    ‘Do I ask you about all your women?’
    ‘Want to hear?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Tell me about Whit Sterling.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘He read you the Teasdale poem.’
    ‘Yes. How did you know?’
    ‘The only time I saw him, a guy was reading North of Boston aloud to him. He was in bed with a stomach ache. When you get through with me, will you shoot me?’
    ‘Red!’ The name was a crying protest.
    ‘I just wanted to make sure,’ Red said. ‘Now let’s go to sleep.’
    ‘Haven’t we anything better to do?’
    ‘Yes,’ Red said.
    * * *
    He took bits of her life and put them together—bits whispered to him in the night. Yet there were not enough to round it out. So he made up the rest. He had time enough on that trip up the coast. The old ship didn’t seem to give a damn if it ever rounded the San Pedro breakwater. Nor did he.
    An unpleasant job confronted him—leaving Mumsie, heading east and trying to make Whit Sterling swallow a tall tale. Not that he worried much about it. He was too busy finding a soul for Mumsie to worry about anything. Yet, when they left the ship and rode by taxi into the hot, dispirited mediocrity that was Los Angeles he decided to put it off for a while.
    There was a little house in Laurel