Faraway Places Read Online Free PDF

After my mother said it, I’d look at him and couldn’t think anything but lard ass .
    And when the Grand Entry was over, the posse in their shiny green shirts faced the grandstand in formation, all of them lined up sitting tall in their saddles. In front of them there were two more posse men on horseback presenting the Idaho state flag and the Matisse County posse flag, and in front of those two, centered between them, was old Harold P. Endicott carrying the American flag. Old Glory snapped at the end of his pole. HaroldP. Endicott took the Stetson off his head and that must have been the signal. Once Endicott showed his bald, sweaty head, the two men behind him took their hats off, and then the straight line of posse members to the rear took theirs off and then all the men and all the cowgirls in the grandstand with hats, took them off. Everybody put their hats on their chests when Harold P. Endicott put his hat on his, and then the organist in the announcer’s stand started playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and we all sang—sang about how America was there in the sky in the twilight, sang about rockets and the red glare and proof through the night. We sang through the waves of dust, things smelling like horse turds, cow manure, fried onions and hot dogs; people sang with their hats on their hearts, sang their heads off with Endicott’s Old Glory snapping, the animals nervous, the Shoshone-Bannock hoop dancers nervous, drinking Thunderbird behind the back pens, under the grandstand, and in their beat-up cars in the parking lot. The steers and bulls and calves and clowns’ trick dogs restless and penned up and hog-tied and caged—every person and creature restless for what always comes after that song: the snap of the gate, the bursting in air, whips, spurs in the flesh, ropes that burned the hide, that choked.
    Brave we sang, and free.
    THE SADDLE ROOM, my father’s saddle room, was in the barn. Its door was always locked, but just from peeking under that door you could see how the cement was swept clean. There was no straw, no dust, not ever. The door was made of two-by-eights—six of them—and creaked like the Inner Sanctum door on the radio when my father pulled it open by its leather strap. My father kept the key to his saddle room door in the little pocket on the right side of his Levi’s. The extra key he hid under a board in the feed manger next to the red radio he used to listen to when he milked the cows.
    I never went into that saddle room. I disobeyed my father about the river that dry summer that I was older, and with onething leading to another like it does, I ran into those other forbiddens, those three forbidden people, but I never did disobey my father when it came to the saddle room. Not once did I set foot into that place—his secret place—not ever, that is, until that night that I got myself out of that room in the St. Anthony’s Hospital and hitched a ride back to the farm with Wolf and Mona Lisa and the others in the Studebaker; not until that night that I found the nigger hanging there. And after I realized what it was, who it was that was hanging, and after I could think and walk again, I walked straight to the red radio and got that key out from under the board in the feed manger, and unlocked the saddle room door. I walked right in there and turned on the light and went straight to the drawer where I knew his secret was. The drawer was locked so I took the twelve-gauge and cocked it and blew a hole in the drawer and then reached right in there and took my father’s secret out; opened the manila envelope, took it out, took them all out and had a good look.
    After all that time standing outside that locked door, finally I was holding the secret in my hands; I was inside the secret room, opened by the secret key hidden in a secret place.
    It wasn’t a place I’d ever expected to be.
    But I knew what to expect once I was in