Georgia Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

busy worrying about Handsome. Ma turned and looked up on the roof. She shook her fist at them, hard. All of them had crossed to the other end of the roof, the end near the kitchen, and they were standing up there looking down at us.
    The billy goat looked Ma straight in the eye, and he stopped chewing as he did it. Ma and the billy acted as if they were trying to see which could stare the other down first.
    Just then fifteen or twenty of the women who had come to the circle meeting stuck their heads around the corner of the house, and looked at us in the backyard. They had got together when they found the front door locked and decided to come around there and see what was going on. They had been able to see the goats on the roof when they came up the street, and they were curious to see what we were making so much racket about back there.
    “My sakes alive, Martha Stroup,” one of them said, “what’s going on here? Those goats up on top of your house is the funniest sight I ever saw!”
    Ma wheeled around and saw the women. She did not say a word, but her hands flew to her face, as though she were trying to hide it, and then she ran into the house through the back door. She slammed it shut and locked it behind her. Pretty soon the women went to the front door, but after they had knocked on it a long time, they gave up trying to get in, and all of them started down the street. They kept looking back over their shoulders at the goats on the roof and laughing loud enough to be heard all over our part of town.

IV. My Old Man and the Grass Widow
    W HEN MY OLD MAN got up earlier than usual and left the house, he did not say where he was going, and Ma was so busy getting ready to do the washing she did not think to ask him.
    Usually when he went off like that, and Ma asked him where he was going, he would say he had to see somebody about something on the other side of town, or that he had a little job to attend to not far off. I don’t know what he would have said that morning if Ma hadn’t been too busy to ask him.
    Anyway, he had got up before anybody else and went straight to the kitchen and cooked his own breakfast. By the time I was up and dressed, he had finished hitching Ida to the cart. He climbed up on the seat and started driving out into the street.
    “Can’t I go, Pa?” I asked him. I ran down the street beside the cart, holding on to the sideboard and begging to go along. “Please let me go, Pa!” I said.
    “Not now, son,” he said, slapping Ida with the reins and whipping her into a trot. “If I need you later, I’ll send for you.”
    They clattered down the street and turned the corner out of sight.
    When I got back to the house, Ma was in the kitchen working over the cook-stove. I sat down and waited for something to eat, but I did not say anything about Pa. It made me feel sad to be left behind like that when Pa and Ida were going some place, and I didn’t feel like talking, even to Ma. I just sat at the table by the stove and waited.
    Ma ate in a hurry and went out into the yard to kindle the fire underneath the washpot.
    Early that afternoon one of the neighbors, Mrs. Singer, who lived on the corner below us, came walking into our backyard. I saw her before Ma did, because I had been sitting on the porch steps almost all day waiting for Pa to come back.
    Mrs. Singer went over to the bench where Ma was washing. She stood and didn’t say anything for a while. Then all at once she leaned over the tub and asked Ma if she knew where Pa was.
    “Most likely sleeping in the shade somewhere,” Ma said, not even straightening up from the scrub board. “Unless he’s too lazy to move out of the sun.”
    “I’m in dead earnest, Martha,” Mrs. Singer said, coming closer to Ma. “I really am.”
    Ma turned around and looked at me on the porch.
    “Run along into the house, William,” she said crossly.
    I went up on the porch as far as the kitchen door. I could hear there just as good.
    “Now,