Dirty Work Read Online Free PDF

trash is always in the eye of the beholder. I know. There were probably some people who thought we were trash. I know there were people who looked down their noses at us because we were on welfare. That and my daddy being in the pen.
    I know people who say, well, I wouldn’t be on welfareand take food stamps or handouts, I’ve got too much pride. That’s fine. Pride is a fine thing to have. The only thing is, you can’t eat pride. But you can eat commodity eggs and flour and rice and cheese and butter and powdered milk, and your babies can eat commodity cereal and drink commodity formula and fruit juice and live without pride. Pride ain’t worth a damn to a hungry kid who wants something to eat, and if a man says he wouldn’t take welfare food when his kids didn’t have anything to eat, if he said that, he’s lying, and I’d tell him so. I know. My mother swallowed her pride and went every week and got that stuff.
    Some people from the welfare office in town came around every week to the post office in London Hill and gave out food to the people on the list. My mother never said anything about it, but I know it hurt her. We had to walk about a mile to get up to the post office from our house. We lived on the south side of what you could call town if it was a town. But it’s not. It’s just a little community about like a thousand others scattered all over the state. Just a little crossroads up in the hills where somebody a long time ago decided to build a house because it had a creek they could get water out of or there was some good timber to cut. The school’s gone now, they tore it down a long time ago. But I can go by there any time I want to and see the spot where Matt Monroe first got me down on the ground.
    The welfare people always came on Thursday afternoon at four o’clock. I’d go home from school and my motherwould be out in the field, and she’d come in and wash up and get ready. Then we’d leave the house and walk back up to London Hill. The roads were all dirt then, and if somebody came along in a vehicle while we were walking, we’d have to get over on the side of the road where the grass was and walk there until they passed. In the summertime it would be dusty, and the dust they raised would settle on us and you could smell it in your nose like something old and sour.
    There was at one time a store that sat in the middle of London Hill, an old store. The tin on the roof had rusted brown a long time before that and the whole thing leaned a little to the left. It had a faded red kerosene tank out front with a pump handle, and old wooden benches that were covered with knife cuts and people’s initials where men had sat there year after year and whittled on them, and it had yellow signs with thermometers and ancient Coca-Cola signs tacked all over the front. The screen door was patched with wads of cotton and it had a strip of blue tin in the middle that said Colonial Bread is Good Bread.
    I never went in the store much when I was little because I never had any money to spend. Usually the only time I’d go in there was when my mother sent me to the store for Kotex. You ever had to go to the store for Kotex? I have. And it’s embarrassing. It’ll also get you into trouble with white trash like Matt Monroe if somebody like Matt Monroe is in there when you go in for your Kotex.
    I think this was the first time I ever scored any Kotex, without knowing what it was. Mother had called me intothe house from whatever I was doing, I don’t remember what. She was hiding behind the kitchen door, just her face looking out. Kind of pale and worriedlike.
    “I need you to go to the store for me,” she said. She had a dollar bill crumpled up in her hand. “I need some Kotex.”
    “Kotex,” I said.
    “It’s in a blue box,” she said. “Don’t get the Junior. Get the Super.”
    “Super.”
    “And hurry.”
    “You want me to run, Mama?”
    “Yes, honey. Run. Please.”
    “Can I get me something if