It Will End with Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

like that.
    If I had to describe my situation in a word, my living situation and psychological situation, and so forth, it would be indeterminate .
    Odd that a word like that, being quite indeterminate itself, can describe a situation so precisely.
    Going on vacation with Thornton might be considered important, I suppose.
    Considered important by me, naturally, though it might not be by anyone unaware of my circumstances.
    The journey of the body is across physical space, on foot, horseback, bicycle, in cars, airplanes, and so forth, on foot again, stumbling, crawling at the end, metaphorically speaking.
    The journey of the soul is through time. I like the odd phrase: a space of time . A gap between one time and another, a continuum without content, a kind of sinkhole into which weeks, months, and years have sunk from view.
    I am traveling, it seems, through the space of time, falling through it actually, it feels to me now.
    The body stops, but space goes on and time goes on.
    The fact is I have no clear idea of what I mean by the word soul .
    A great whoosh of feathers, and a pair of doves descends on my feeder, startling me and sending sparrows flittering off in every direction.
    If a sparrow tries to come back, alighting cautiously at the very edge of the feeder, the doves puff out their chests, hunch their wings, bat-like, and strut and jut about on the feeder looking terribly frightening.
    Hummingbirds, oddly, are also quite aggressive, though mockingbirds are easily the most aggressive birds I know.
    Excluding hawks and falcons, of course, who are positively murderous.
    Even so, birds cannot be considered neurotic.
    Any bad feelings they have they get rid of by flying, I imagine.
    On second thought, though, remembering now, some chickens are horribly neurotic.
    And parrots, of course, as everyone knows, the ones in cages anyway, plucking out their own feathers.
    As did my mother, with her hair, pulling most of it out.
    I have always been crazy about birds.
    Even so, I don’t care for Poe.
    And of course it was a crow, not a raven.
    The shops had screen doors and slow-turning fans on the ceilings when I was a child.
    The grocery store, the hardware, and the feed store had floors of broad wooden planks with wide cracks between them.
    When you jumped on the floor of the feed store a cloud of dust came up.
    The drugstore had a floor of black and white linoleum tiles. You had always to step only on black tiles or something awful would happen.
    I remember Thornton, one day when he was angry at me, deliberately walking on the white tiles.
    The colored man who worked in the feed store had a daughter who was born with six toes on each foot. Her father chopped the extra ones off with a kitchen knife, Mama said.
    I remember Mama cutting okra at the kitchen table. She looked at my bare feet and at her knifeand said, “Hmm, looks like this child’s got too many toes.”
    I remember pretending to be frightened, and at the same time actually being a little bit frightened.
    The odd phrase: “She was half pretending.”
    I was half frightened, I think, because I sensed that my mother was only half pretending.
    We, meaning my brothers and I, liked to pretend we were orphans.
    The cat sits in a patch of sunlight and washes itself. It likes pretending it doesn’t care about my sparrows.
    I lean across the desk, close to the open window, and wave. The cat stops washing and looks.
    I remember a wizened halfwit named Doc who rode a bicycle. He was the only grown-up who rode a bicycle in that town.
    The time Thornton and some other boys ran behind and pummeled him with dirt clods.
    I have a clear mental image of his face, the skin of his face like creased leather, but I can’t tell from the image if he was a white man or a Negro, pedaling as hard as he could.
    I remember when Brazil nuts were called nigger toes.
    I remember black boys swimming in Johnson Creek below the bridge, where one day we saw a very small boy with skin as white as