It Will End with Us Read Online Free PDF

standing among the wandering chickens in the yards, looking up at our car, staring, unsmiling usually but sometimes waving, unsure, flow through my mind the way they flowed past the car.
    I remember looking out the rear window at a cloud of dust curling behind us, and coming to a stop and the dust catching up with us and rolling over the car.
    Images from different times, flowing together now.
    Miles of pine forest there now, broken by roadside clearings and trailers and little brick houses without porches, and nobody outside because of air-conditioning and television, I noticed, passing in the car with Lester down the same roads, unable to attach those other images to anything there now.
    Mama, Papa, Lila, Verdell are dead now. Edward too, for all I know.
    I remember hot summer nights when all three of us slept on iron bedsteads that Verdell set up on the screen porch, the dogs out there with us.
    The time we made music by banging on the metal bed rails with sticks and spoons as hard as we could, Papa yelling at us to stop.
    The time Edward fell out of bed and then Thornton fell out of his bed on purpose, but I was afraid to fall out of mine.
    I remember Mama on the porch, her back to me, working a handful of raw cotton into a torn place in the screen to stop mosquitoes getting in, immobile in that posture, in that image.
    We sometimes heard, even above the continuous shrill vibrato of insects and frogs, the whistle of a freight train crossing the trestle half a mile downriver, though never the fainter clickety-clicks of the wheels, as we could sometimes in the mortuary silence of winter.
    Steam locomotives, and the breathy melancholy of their whistles, were among the first things that I became aware of as having disappeared.
    A steam locomotive took my mother to New York when she was young and she never forgot it.
    The time I rode a train to Connecticut with Thornton and my father, taking Thornton back to college, it was a diesel locomotive.
    Thornton uses an airplane to travel now.
    Hearing the Cessna overhead, I would run to get Mama and rush with her into the yard and we would stand there waving.
    Waving and waving while the little blue plane banked and came back over the treetops, roaring overhead, almost scraping the roof, it looked from below, the dogs frantic, leaping and barking, andthe plane going away, disappearing behind the trees in the direction of the county airfield, the sound of it vanishing finally, and having scarcely time to get ready and get Mama ready before Thornton would be driving up to the house.
    Showing Maria the photograph of Thornton standing by his airplane.
    Maria has never flown in an airplane.
    Sometimes I get Lester to take me out in the car and we just ride around.
    When Lester drives me I ride in back.
    When Mama or Papa drove Lila home, Lila rode in back.
    The road to Lila’s house went past a big sinkhole, a nearly circular pool of black water fringed withstumps of sawed-off cypress trees and a few gnarly tupelos left standing because they were trash trees not even good for burning, the grain of a tupelo log running every which way and no man alive able to split it, my father said.
    If a cow went to drink in that hole and fell in, it would sink forever, Lila said.
    I went to Verdell’s house with my father and a goat knocked me over.
    Before Lester there was Vernon, before Vernon there was Huey, and so forth.
    Before Maria there was Ruth, before Ruth there was Beth, before Beth I was at Spring Hope, wandering from room to room, as I mentioned, with dogs, as I also mentioned.
    It is generally true, I think, that very little of importance happens now.
    I am aware of a long stretch of time, but it is mostly undifferentiated, without markers.
    If I try to imagine “a long stretch of time” I picture a level landscape without trees and a narrow unpaved road running across it all the way to a distant horizon.
    A long beige ribbon of time.
    Even though I have never actually seen a landscape