Love and Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page B

than any the real case warranted. They hadn't loved Miss Martha, Father Midnight's sister, but she was vague and easily fooled, and they hadn't feared her.
    (It was Hildy who had first seen that their parish priest was a replica of the unheroic hero on TV, who, whatever deeds he might once have done in some other medium somewhere else, on their Saturdays now merely introduced ancient cowboy movies from behind a desk, and in the intervals sold a hot drink the children had never drunk and could not imagine. The priest was he exactly, but in phony eyeglasses and liturgical gear: Father Midnight. Warren had to be strictly schooled never to call him that.)
    It wasn't conceivable that the children should attend the local grammar school. There was one, a square brick building not in the town of Bondieu but in the town of Good Luck, a mile or so distant. Like the square brick hospital, like the rows of gritty cabins along the railroad track, the school was a beneficence of the Good Luck Coal and Coke Company in the early years of the century. Now it was the property of the state, and all the children of Bondieu who went to school went there, just as almost all the fathers who worked had once worked for Good Luck Coal and Coke. Dr. Hazelton himself had dispensed pills to miners and miners’ wives at the Good Luck hospital, which had just closed its doors for good. “Good luck for the patients,” Sam said.
    Sam's arrangement with his hospital had from the beginning included provision of a tutor for his children; Opal Boyd had seen too many schools like the Good Luck school, and had known their teachers. So Miss Martha, who had trained as a teacher though she had only briefly been one, had been hired, and Opal had done the rest, until her headaches got too bad; and now Miss Martha too was gone. September ran into October. The children lived within an unwonted freedom that could end any day; they got used to it. Summer's games continued. They were like the mountain children they knew of but rarely encountered, shoeless wraiths invisible to teacher or to principal.
    They did read, though. There wasn't one of them, not even Joe Boyd, who didn't. They read through meals and chores and car-trips; they hogged the bathroom, unwilling to leave the pot where they sat reading. Hildy could read and listen to the radio at the same time, and miss nothing either of Nancy Drew or of Sky King. Sam read the novels that Winnie finished, as he had read Opal's.
    They got their books by writing to the State Library in Lexington and asking for them; there was no public library for mountain miles in any direction from Bondieu. Once a month a big box of them arrived in a sort of laundry case with canvas belts that could be done up when the books had been read (or not read) and were to be sent back. What books were received depended on what was asked for, who received the order, and what the library had, which wasn't Everything though it seemed bottomless from Bondieu. If Bird asked for a book about horses, she was as likely to get dense volumes on equine anatomy or ranch management as she was to get another book like Black Beauty, which was what she wanted. Joe Boyd knew what he wanted, but not how to describe it: he wanted books full of facts, strange but true, things which he could ask others if they knew and be certain they would not: the number of peepers that could sit side by side on a single pencil, the number of pencils that could be made from a single cedar tree. If the facts were disgusting as well as obscure, that was all the better.
    It was Joe Boyd's description of this category, however he had phrased it, that had once brought him a big book whose end-papers showed a mass of ruins, and whose double-columned pages were filled with tenebrous illustration. Or maybe it had been put in just to fill up the box, as the best and worst books the family got often were. Anyway Joe Boyd claimed it, and looked through it for a while, enjoying the images of