Child of God Read Online Free PDF

After a day or two Ballard fell into talking with him. He said: What’s your name?
    John, said the nigger. Nigger John.
    Where you from. You a fugitive ain’t ye?
    I’m from Pine Bluff Arkansas and I’m a fugitive from the ways of this world. I’d be a fugitive from my mind if I had me some snow.
    What you in for?
    I cut a motherfucker’s head off with a pocketknife.
    Ballard waited to be asked his own crime but he wasn’t asked. After a while he said: I was supposed to of raped this old girl. She wasn’t nothin but a whore to start with.
    White pussy is nothin but trouble.
    Ballard agreed that it was. He guessed he’d thought so but he’d never heard it put that way.
    The black sat on his cot and rocked back and forth. He crooned:
Flyin home
Fly like a motherfucker
Flyin home
    All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He’d often heard men say as much.
    All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught, said the black.
    After a week the sheriff came down the corridor one day and took the nigger away. Flyin home, sang the nigger.
    You’ll be flyin all right, said the sheriff. Home to your maker.
    Fly like a motherfucker, sang the nigger.
    Take it easy, called Ballard.
    The nigger didn’t say if he would or wouldn’t.
    The next day the sheriff came again and stopped in front of Ballard’s cage and peered in at him. Ballard peered back. The sheriff had a straw in his teeth and he took it out to speak. He said: Where was that woman from?
    What woman?
    That one you raped.
    You mean that old whore?
    All right. That old whore.
    I don’t know. How the hell would I know where she was from?
    Was she from Sevier County?
    I don’t know, damn it.
    The sheriff looked at him and put the straw back in his teeth and went away.
    They came for Ballard the next morning, turnkey and bailiff.
    Ballard, the turnkey said.
    Yeah.
    He followed the bailiff down the corridor. The turnkey followed. They went downstairs, Ballard easing himself along the iron bannister pipe. They went outside and across a parking lot to the courthouse.
    They sat him in a chair in an empty room. He could see a thin strip of color and movement through the gap of the double doors and he listened vaguely to legal proceedings. After an hour or so the bailiff came in and crooked his finger at Ballard. Ballard rose and went through the doors and sat in a church-bench behind a little rail.
    He heard his name. He closed his eyes. He opened them again. A man in a white shirt at the desk looked at him and looked at some papers and then he looked at the sheriff. Since when? he said.
    It’s been a week or better.
    Well tell him to get on out of here.
    The bailiff came over and opened the gate and leaned toward Ballard. You can go, he said.
    Ballard stood up and went through the gate and across the room toward a door with daylight in it and across a hall and out through the front door of the Sevier County courthouse. No one called him back. A drooling man at the door held out a greasy hat at him and mumbled something. Ballard went down the steps and crossed the street.
    Uptown he walked around in the stores. He went into the postoffice and looked through the sheaves of posters. The wanted stared back with surly eyes. Men of many names. Their tattoos. Legends of dead loves inscribed on perishable flesh. A prevalence of blue panthers.
    He was standing in the street with his hands in his back pockets when the sheriff walked up.
    What’s your plans now? said the sheriff.
    Go home, said Ballard.
    And what then. What sort of meanness have you got laid out for next.
    I ain’t got any laid out.
    I figure you ought to give us a clue. Make it more fair. Let’s see: failure to comply with a court order, public disturbance, assault and battery, public drunk, rape. I guess murder is next on the list ain’t it? Or what things is it you’ve done that we ain’t found out yet.
    I ain’t done nothin, Ballard said. You just got it