Exile on Kalamazoo Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

a god.”
    He had an expression I could not quite decipher—something stuck between amusement and curiosity and even a dash of confusion.
    â€œCan I get you more tea, Reverend?”
    He blinked and seemed to come back from wherever his mind had gone momentarily. To a higher plane, no doubt. The highest plane.
    â€œThanks, but no, Bryce. It was very good tea, though.”
    â€œIt’s the honey, Reverend, I always say.”
    He nodded gravely and then I showed him out the side door. From the window in the front door, I watched him walk to his car and stop next to it for a long moment, looking back at my house. I instinctively backed away from the window, fearful that somehow he could look past the door and into my soul. I knew I had been a bit churlish with him—what a word, churlish . It seemed to sound like what it described. I resolved to dial down my snarkiness whenever I could. I knew that he was just doing his job, as I was doing my new job of being a lost lamb. Snarkiness and churlishness were part of the territory.

Chapter 3: The Actual Beginning
    T here were days before Black Kitty appeared in which thick winter clouds hugged a pudgy horizon. Fidgety sparrows clumped together on power lines, or clustered for warmth on bare, bony tree branches. It was so cold it stung to press a finger to a windowpane, even from the inside. January had come wickedly hard and frigid. The street in front of my house—Kalamazoo Street—was submerged beneath a brilliant white coat of snow, and on the first day of the blizzard the snowplows did not dare appear. I saw no one outside at all for hours and the wind whipped the snow furiously. I watched for the sparrows, but they had gone somewhere else and I could not quite imagine where they could go that was any better.
    The first of the snowplows appeared skeptically. I could hear it chugging along. Black smoke erupted from its exhaust. I saw two men get out and walk up to where the street lay buried. They wore black rubber boots, thick brown overalls, and hats with flaps like in movies about Russia. Both men were short, squat, and stood with gloved hands on their hips to survey the snow with a perplexed air, as though considering whether to decline this particular order. Then they exchanged a look and climbed back into the yellow snowplow. It carved a path down the street, slowly, sluggishly—a battering ram with a loud chugging motor. One of the men stuck his head out a window to watch the blade cutting. He shook his head and I raised my cup of warm and steamy coffee in salute, but of course he did not look up, had no reason to look up at a window, did not see me or anything but the struggle ahead between metal and frozen water as the icy wind blew back the flaps of his silly hat.
    Kalamazoo Street took hours to clear, the snow piled in dirty heaps in front of houses, and the brown and red bricks of the street exposed and clean, like a newly excavated site picked clean by archeologists. But it was still very cold and a glaze of frost soon covered the street. A car slid sideways and was stuck in the only drift that had been left below the curb. I watched the driver, a woman bundled tightly—encased—in a full-length down coat and red knit hat pulled down over her ears as she walked back up the street. She quickly returned with three men equally sealed in thick coats and their heads topped with blue knit caps. They pushed her car out of the drift as the car’s exhaust stained the snow the color of charcoal.
    At night I watched the clear street from the second-story bedroom window. The moon was almost full and glowed brightly. Across the street from my house, a streetlight flickered into life. I could see the very tall pine tree behind it, and lights warm and glowing in houses along my block, and soon a man in a coat with the hood up trundled along the sidewalk across the street. I could see his breath ejaculating from his mouth, his head was