Darby Read Online Free PDF

nothing comes in.
    “Great-Uncle Harvey,” I started, turning my newspaper notebook to a blank page, “what’s it like to be blind?”
    Great-Uncle Harvey smiled and looked near me. “What’s it like to be blind? I’d say it’s real dark.”
    Trying to act professional, I nodded my head and wrote that down. “But . . . you can hear real good, can’t you, sir?”
    “Like you wouldn’t believe, ma’am,” he kidded me. “I can smell good, too.”
    For a minute, I stalled on knowing what else to ask. Thinking hard, I finally said, “Is it nice to hear real well?”
    Great-Uncle Harvey shrugged his wide shoulders. “It’s okay. I enjoy the fact that a lot of other people don’t hear as good. Matter of fact, I take great pride in pointing out things I hear to people who can see, ’cause they’re always surprised. I can tell you if a bird’s in a tree and, if it sings, what kind it is. I can tell you if there’s a cat or a squirrel scampering in the woods . . . I can hear things like the walls and floors creaking in a house and tell you if a place is old or new —”
    “Great-Uncle Harvey?”
    “Yes, child?”
    “I can’t write that fast.”
    “Sorry,” he said, grinning.
    “My hand gets all cramped, is why.”
    “Can’t say I ever had a hand cramp.”
    So there we were, and he talked slower and told me about how he could read things that were written in Braille, which is this way of spelling words with bumps. He said he could do it with his fingertips and that some books were written up that way just for blind people. He said that he liked to eat because he tasted food real well. Then he said he liked dressing nice like he did to show that blind people care about their appearance. He also decided that his favorite thing to do is to listen or tell stories, and another thing he liked was to get pushed around Charleston in his rolling chair. He said that when Jacob took him around the city that way, he heard birds and water and all sorts of people talking.
    Finally, Great-Uncle Harvey paused, and asked, “So, Darby, when is this here article on me gonna be completed? You got any idea?”
    “So that Mr. Salter can see it before the weekend, I’m gonna try and get it done by Friday.”
    “You gonna mail me a copy?”
    “You think somebody’ll turn it into bumps for you?”
    “Naw, a nurse’ll just read it to me, probably. It’ll give me a chance to brag on you some.”
    I smiled, clamping my jaw shut so that my teeth wouldn’t tap from being cold. My body had been so trembly, though, that it looked like I’d been writing while I was bouncing in my daddy’s car. “I’m gonna write about you real good,” I said.
    “You do that,” he said. “Now I’m all talked out, so you run on to bed ’fore you catch your death out here.”
    Staring at his face, I asked, “Great-Uncle Harvey, how’d you know I was cold?”
    He answered, “On account of the way your voice sounds.”

At night, sometimes, I can’t sleep even with my aunt Greer nearby. It’s an awful feeling. I wake up with the worst fright and listen to the owls and the crickets and a few last bullfrogs. And even though I recognize everything, their noises scare me all the way to my heart. Looking around my room, first at my aunt Greer to be sure she’s the one breathing heavy, I study the walls and the windows and the shadows flittering, and the whole bunch looks ghoulish. Whenever I wake up that way, I think about that mansion in Bennettsville that was owned by Mr. Grissel, who during the Civil War was in charge of fetching boys who didn’t want to fight. He fixed it so they either did fight or were shot. Of all of the haunted houses in Marlboro County, his is the most famous. He choked on a possum bone way before I was born, but nobody ever bought his property. Everyone knows that all the ghosts of the boys he caused to get shot are walking around that house looking to get even with Mr. Grissel. I suppose, for some reason, they