It Will End with Us Read Online Free PDF Page A

dented ping-pong ball, and Thornton saying it was a snake egg.
    The fact that Peter Caldwell, who was Edward’s friend, had a dog named Ping-Pong.
    The time Edward said table tennis was the same as ping-pong.
    The fact that Ping Pong was not the name of a Chinese person who invented ping-pong.
    I have a single vivid memory of the French-Indochina war. From the back seat of a car I heard the words Dien Bien Phu issuing from a chrome grill in the dashboard. The words fall of , as in the fall of Rome , followed by that strange unimaginable name.
    It was a black Chevrolet car, I am almost sure.
    In the strangeness of the name Dien Bien Phu, in the remoteness of Indochina, lay a first dim awareness, I think now, that we were provincial people, that we lived in an out-of-the-way insignificant place.
    The next war I remember was in Indochina again. The memories of that war, meaning of course the memories of the news of that war, are exceptionally clear, because I was an adult then and because of television, I suppose, and also quite meaningless.
    If Edward had died in Vietnam someone would have told us, I am sure.
    I learned to read at the same time as Thornton, who was two years older, I remember Mama telling a woman who had poked her head in through the car window.
    I remember “My daughter, the genius,” and my mother standing behind me, gripping my shoulders while I stared in terror at the school principal.
    The time I stood at a bookcase and sounded out the names on the spines, Mama correcting me when I was wrong. “Not Goth , honey, it’s pronounced Gerty .”
    Scolding me when I said somebody busted an arm or skint a knee but letting Edward and Thornton say them.
    My father clapping his hands and saying “well, well” the time I spelled Wednesday after Thornton said I couldn’t.
    I was born knowing how to read, Mama said.
    Thornton said facetious was not a word.
    I was a naturally gifted child.
    My mother’s brother Louis Staunton, who went to Paris to study painting and died of a rupturedappendix before he could attend a single class, was naturally gifted.
    His life was snuffed out, my mother said.
    She always used the phrase snuffed out when speaking of the death of young artists like Louis Staunton or John Keats, whose life was snuffed out by tuberculosis.
    Being snuffed out like Uncle Louis was a tragic irony, my mother said.
    There was a photograph of a teenaged Louis Staunton in the library at Spring Hope. He was seated on a large white horse, a pale blond boy who looked ill, I thought.
    The time I played dying with Thornton. I lay on the cracked leather sofa, beneath the picture of poor dead Louis Staunton, my hands crossed onmy chest, while Thornton intoned, “She was not yet seven . . .”
    There was cotton in the fields back of the house when I was very small, followed by a green bushy crop that I think now must have been soybeans, and then just tall grass that turned pale brown and grew feathery tassels in the fall, and after a time the grass also went, overtaken by shortleaf pines, which Papa called field pines, and stunted blackjack oaks.
    There are houses in the fields now, I believe, but I have not gone back to look.
    The soil at Spring Hope wasn’t worth a goddamn, my father said.
    Knowing even as a small child that we inhabited a poor, unfertile, unlucky land that nothing good would come from.
    I remember my mother saying that the South was a tragic land.
    I remember fields baking in the sun, the distant trees shimmering in the heat waves. I remember dust devils swirling across the fields.
    I remember my father taking the three of us for long aimless rides in the car on hot evenings. We rolled down all the windows and tilted the vent windows to make more wind, and though the air was hot the wind made us feel cool.
    Images of unpainted shacks and tumble-down sheds in small acres of poor-looking fields, mules in paddocks, hogs in makeshift slab pens, and strange dirty barefoot children my own age