Covered Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

he?” said Old Mac Gleason. “I guess he knows that Hell speech off by heart by now.”
    â€œHow did you know he was talking about Hell?” I said. “Were you at church today?”
    â€œNo, I was not,” said Old Mac Gleason. “Nor will I ever set foot in that place as long as I live. I don’t care if it is only just across the road! But I’ll tell you, there’s two ways you can tell a thing like that. First of all, you watch the people coming out. The looks on their faces. Some ofthem look like they’ve just dirtied their pants and some are kind of blue around the gills and some are so guilty-looking you’d think they just took an ax to their whole family.”
    I waited a little bit while we listened to a heat bug singing that one note about the heat.
    â€œWhat’s the other way you can tell?” I said.
    â€œThe other way you can tell,” he said, leaning right over to Nerves and me, “is that you can hear the old fool from all the way over here!”
    Then he looked up and over at the graveyard so steadily that Nerves and I looked over too.
    There was a man at Ophelia Brown’s grave, kneeling there, with flowers in his hands. He crossed himself and then he got up and replaced the flowers that were there with the new ones.
    Then he knelt again and kissed the ground.
    â€œKnow who that is?” asked Old Mac Gleason.
    It was too far away to make out the man’s face but the way his back was humped over looked sort of familiar.
    â€œYou know the postman, don’t you? Oscar McCracken? He’s just finished the Sunday mail. He’s also our grave-digger, did you know that?”
    I could tell now it was Oscar McCracken the way he was walking now away from Ophelia Brown’s grave with his head down, watching his shoes.
    â€œStrange rig, that one. A queer duck, that’s for sure,” said Old Mac Gleason. “When you get to know MushratCreek a little better you’ll find out more than you’ll ever need to know about strange rigs like that Oscar McCracken and his grave outside the fence...you know you’re the first strangers that have come in to live here for a good while now. You think you’ll settle here? You could find a better spot than beside that old broken-down covered bridge...say, that’s a funny lookin’ dog—what kind of a dog is that anyway—or is it a dog at all—sure, it looks more like a—I don’t know what the hell it looks like come to think of it...”
    Just then, Mrs. O’Driscoll came along, calling to us from the road. She had been up a ways, visiting after church.
    Mrs. O’Driscoll and I and Nerves walked across the covered bridge to our mailbox.
    Was there a letter there from Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell? There wasn’t, but there was a seed catalogue for Mrs. O’Driscoll and a Police Gazette for O’Driscoll.
    At least some of our family was getting some mail.
    O’Driscoll looked forward to getting his Police Gazette every two weeks or so. He would save it for Sunday and take it into the parlor after church and sit down in there and read it.
    Nobody went in there very often unless maybe there was a visitor in the house. But O’Driscoll liked to go in there on Sunday when his shoes were shined and he had on his white shirt and tie. Sometimes I went in with my
War and Peace
and sat there with him and read silentlythere, sitting on the chair with the big sunflowers that matched the couch that O’Driscoll was on.
    The parlor smelled of sweet dust and old bread dough. It was very quiet in there. Except for the ticking of the clock on the fake mantelpiece. There were two big old photographs in round frames on the walls, a yellowish color, a man and a woman, stiff collars, sour faces. And one square photograph of a little kid who looked like he hated his clothes. There was something wrong with his face, though. I couldn’t figure out