Nightjohn Read Online Free PDF Page B

dirt.
    H
    Mammy she was in the other end and she came walking down to us. The young ones be out playing. Everybody else in the field. I thought she would roar at him, maybe gut him.
    But she’s smiling.
    “Are you addled in the brain?” she asked.
    He nodded. On his side, laying like a broke dog. He smiled back. “I don’t get smarter. Just older.”
    “You know what he’ll do if he catchesyou teaching letters again? You ain’t got so many more toes.”
    “Two more nights, I’m gone.”
    “On those feet?”
    “On these feet.”
    “You’ll bleed out. I knew you were going, but wait a week.”
    “How did you know I was going?”
    “You were always going. When you came here they brought you in the collar. You are born to leave.”
    John’s smile grew wider. “We should have met some other place.”
    “And other time.” Mammy she snorted. “I make two of you, old enough to be your mother.”
    John laughed. Rolling deep sound. “Maybe so that doesn’t matter so much.…”
    Mammy she went on and he lay back. Looked to me. “Make the
H
. Make the sound, then the letter. When you getdone, fetch me a piece of rawhide from the barn, so big.” He held up his hands. “I need to make some shoes.”
    And in two nights, like he said, he was gone. He made the shoes out of rawhide and put rags around his toes and on the night he was to leave he made me to fetch him lard and pepper.
    “For the dogs,” he said. He rubbed the lard thick on the bottom of each shoe and wiped pepper in the lard and stood to leave. “Throws their smell off to the side.”
    Everybody asleep. Even mammy. Except me.
    “I’ll be back,” he said. “Got some things to do and I’ll be back.”
    But I knew he was lying. Just being good, saying the good things to hear. He ain’t coming back, I thought, and watched him leave, hobbling on his stiff shoes and sore feet covered with rags.
    Man gets out of here, I thought, gets clear again, he won’t never come be here again. Never coming back.
    Not unless the dogs catched him.

SEVEN
    Wrong again.
    Only not right away.
    He made it clean away. The next day Waller he took the dogs and two field hands and his horse and set off swearing and stinking. Two days he be gone, and he come back and make a storm around the place so we all know John he made it. He be gone.
    Mammy she cried in a happy way and I smiled some for a time and hoped him well, though he left me hanging. Ihad only the same letters as on both hands.
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J
.
    I could write them and read them and I took to making words in my head with them. Made
HID
. And
FIB
. And
JAB
. And
HAD
. And
BIG
.
    Other words. But I didn’t dare write them in the dirt. Waller catch me and he’d make a tobacco pouch out of my skin. So I did them in my head, and tried to see the words, see the letters. But summer went, and then we took in crops. Cotton and corn and killing pigs came. Into fall. I still tried to make the letters in my head, and the words.
    But my troubles came and though I hid it I knew they’d get to finding out and send me to the breeding shed.
    I was in a misery. Mammy she worked to cheer me but it didn’t do any good. I was feared and worried day to day that I’d be found out.
    Come a night in winter. Leaves gone,pigs all killed and hams hanging in the smokehouse. I sat in the dark, in the corner of the quarters, wishing I could go back a season to where I didn’t have the troubles, and I heard a sound next to me in the dark and it was him.
    John.
    Be right there, next to me.
    “Come on,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Follow me. We got to go so’s you can get back before first light.”
    “Go where?”
    He smiled. Took my hand. Led me to the door. “School—we got to go to school. Don’t you want to learn the rest of the letters?”
    “But—”
    And we go.
    I was never off the place. Been only once to the fields where the corn and cotton grow. John he take me across thefields, out the other end into thick