Father and Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

it swiftly, from long practice. His fingers were steady and soon he was done. With the cigarette between his lips he glanced up.
    â€œWell,” he said. “You don’t look no worse for wear.”
    Glen didn’t answer right away. He was thinking of the days he had worked in this garden with his mother, of wandering its rows of tomatoes with a jar in his hand for the worms that crawled over the young green globes. He would pick them off and put them in his jar. She punched holes in the top for air. Or she would send him every other day to cut the okra with the small dull paring knife. When they needed beanpoles she would drive them down a dirt road into the creek bottom and they’d walk around the edges of the freshly plowed fields to the stands of cane that bordered the banks. He remembered lashing big racks of them to the top of the car, their long and limber ends. Gathering extra ones for set hooks in the river, wet foggy mornings clambering up and down the muddy banks with his father, the catfish breaking the surfaceand gasping for water on the ends of their lines. Virgil’s hair was still black then, and his wounds had not slowed him down so much. No bad car wrecks yet. He wrestled a catfish out of a hole in the bank one morning and it weighed forty pounds. They still had the picture somewhere, Glen guessed, but he didn’t need to see it. He could remember Virgil sitting beside the thing fifty feet back from the bank, smoking his readyrolleds then, the muscles of his broad back showing through his wet shirt, the fish breathing steadily in her new world and the sleek thickness of her shining flanks. And the fish fry that weekend, his mother cooking in the kitchen and their cousins and uncles drinking beer with his father at the table. Old voices and old times gone by and the memories of them like faded photos on a screen.
    He looked up at his daddy. “You still just look like an old drunk to me,” he said.
    Puppy swelled up. His face went red. Glen watched him for a second and then told his father, “You too sorry to even put her a headstone up. And he wanted me to come see you. Well. I’ve seen you.”
    Virgil met his eyes with a level gaze and drew calmly on his smoke. He never even blinked. The Redbone puppy poked his head out from the side of the house and watched them hopefully, wagging his tail briefly. He seemed not to want to offend anybody. It was quiet for a moment.
    Puppy sat down on the steps. He stared at the ground. He looked as if all the air had gone out of him.
    â€œThat trip down there didn’t do you a damn bit of good,” he said sadly. He lifted his beer and drank.
    Virgil didn’t say anything. He just sat there in his chair and looked out across the road.
    Glen turned away. Off to the fields and past the trees where the clouds drifted in the sky. He reached in his pocket for a smoke, took one out ofthe pack, and put it to his lips. “Welcome fuckin home, huh?” he said. He lit the cigarette with a battered gold Zippo, snapped the lighter shut, and returned it to his pocket.

The house was one of the few things Glen had salvaged from his marriage. It had five rooms and brick siding with a tin roof. Weeds had grown up in the yard and one corner of the porch was sagging. Striped wasps threaded the air over his head as he turned the knob and pushed the front door open. Inside lay the silence of a house long empty. She had taken very little, only her clothes it looked like. The furniture was coated with dust and the television sat in one corner black and dead. Somebody had been in the house walking around, footprints proving it in the solid coating of dust on the floor.
    He walked back to the kitchen. Dirt daubers had built nests on the walls and in the sink lay some dead bugs, a few encrusted plates. He went back outside and closed the door behind him. Puppy was standing in the yard and he was a little drunk. He had taken the fresh battery