Jolly Read Online Free PDF Page B

black snakes after a winter’s sleep.
    The ceiling wasn’t very high in this kitchen, not like in the big house out on the ranch where they had lived until last year. Living in Cortez had been exciting at first, especially in the winter when a person could slide so much better on the frozen cement hills. But now that summer was coming, Jolly missed the country where people didn’t have to wear shoes every day if they didn’t want to, and there weren’t any sidewalks to burn your feet if you did go barefooted. There were a lot of other things he thought about some, too. He even missed the cows that chased him relentlessly. And the swamp and mulberries and Pekoe. He still didn’t have it clear in his mind what they had done with Pekoe when they moved. Jolly imagined he was probably still sitting on the front porch steps out there, thumping his shaggy tail, with that sort of grin on his face just as he always had when Jolly came from school.
    “Jolly, I’m talking to you!”
    “Yes’m. I mean, no’m—I can’t think of anything.” He didn’t like it when Nell Ann got up her bossy voice. He added, “I told you already.”
    “Mother, he’s not even listening!”
    “I am so! I want a racer bike with hand brakes and those skinny tires and a light and a horn and costs a hunnerd dollars.”
    “Joll,” warned Mama, low. He knew he’d better be clearing out. As long as Mama said Jolly-Bo he had nothing to worry about. Sometimes still, in the evening when supper dishes were done and he sat by her rocker and read while she darned socks, her glasses riding low on her nose, she would call him Jolly-Bo-Bik’m-Bak’m. But the shorter the name became, the more serious. When she got all the way down to Joll then it was time to clear out before she started going the other way towards his full real name. Next it would be Jolliff or Jolliff Harrison, which was serious, but when she got to the whole thing—Jolliff Harrison Osment—it was too late.
    “OK, I’m going outside.”
    “Where you going?”
    “Nowhere. Just out front.”
    Mama’s attention was already shoved between the boiling pot on the stove and its lid held above her head like one steaming cymbal as she bent to peer at the greens.
    Jolly scuffed the distance down the dirt path between the two tired pines to the sidewalk. He sat on the curb with his feet drawn up close under him and studied the turnip. He wished somebody would explain, plainly, how long away Memorial Day was. Oh, he knew it was at the end of May, and that this was May. He could read that on the calendar. But that wasn’t the same as somebody telling you, explaining how long.
    He scraped some more on the turnip and picked up a red ant between his thumb and finger, hard, as Jamie had shown him when they were still all together in the country. He dropped the ant onto an oily spot between his feet and bent over, his straw hair hanging down like a broom. Satisfied with the extent of its mutilation, he squashed it into the oil with his bare heel. He replaced his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands with the turnip just resting against his left ear. He wondered for the thousandth time why, when you put something under your chin—like your hands or a table—your head moved up and down when you chewed.
    Jolly had been pondering Memorial Day nearly ever since they had moved to town eight months before. He knew what the day was for; it was for memorying the dead. He was going to visit the graveyard this Memorial Day, alone. His mother had gone out there two or three times when she had some fitting roses or stock and someone to drive her. Jolly was waiting to make a special trip, and it had to be on Memorial Day. That was why it was so important that he know exactly the right day. If he wasn’t careful, nobody would tell him when the day came and then the whole plan would be wrecked.
    He knew the road to the graveyard, although he had been there but once, nearly two years ago. He would have