One Foot in Eden Read Online Free PDF

were poor in a way none of my people had been since the Depression. They got water from a well, and they still used an outhouse. I wasn’t even sure they had a truck. There’d been no tire tracks in the weeds and rocks that passed for a driveway.
    She didn’t ask me to sit down, but I did anyway.
    ‘I can get you some tea to drink,’ she said, but her tone made it clear she didn’t want to get me anything other than out of her house.
    ‘No, thanks.’
    She sat down in the other chair.
    ‘I just wanted to ask you about Holland Winchester. Like I said, his momma thinks you might know something.’
    ‘I didn’t know,’ Amy Holcombe said, and she caught herself, because what she was going to say was either ‘I didn’t know him’ or ‘I didn’t know him hardly at all.’ Either way it was past tense, the tense used to speak of the dead.
    ‘I didn’t know him to be missing,’ she finally said, and that was slick on her part because she didn’t have to take back the I didn’t know .
    ‘I think maybe you and your husband know where he is,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be easier on everybody if you all just go ahead and admit it.’
    ‘I don’t know nothing about where Holland Winchester is,’ she said, getting up from her chair. ‘I got things to do, Sheriff.’
    ‘You won’t mind me looking around, will you?’
    ‘Me and Billy, we got nothing to hide,’ she said. She picked up the broom like she was going to sweep me out if I didn’t move toward the door on my own.
    I got up from the chair. Nothing to hide but a body, I thought, a body I believed would turn up soon enough.
    ‘Goodbye, Mrs. Holcombe,’ I said, but she’d already turned her back to me.
    The sunlight was bright and startling after being in the house.
    I checked the barn first and found a truck with two flat tires and a cracked engine block. The only way that truck could have moved was if there’d been a team of horses to drag it. That was good news for me. Holland’s body couldn’t be too far away. I stepped in the woodshed, and after that I peered down the well. I wasn’t seriously searching, just getting a feel for the layout of the farm.
    I watched Billy out in his field. He hadn’t tried to make a run for it, the way many another man might have. Instead, he was going about his business. I wondered for the first time if I’d underestimated him. I wondered if he might be like those men I’d known in the Pacific, the ones you’d have expected to be the first to cut and run and then in battle they surprised you, surprised themselves.
    I had been a man like that, though I was big and stout-looking enough to fool everybody but myself. I hadn’t known what I would do in battle, and the morning I waited for the LAV to land on Guadalcanal, I was so afraid I threw up.
    ‘The hillbilly’s not used to the ocean,’ one of the other soldiers said, but it wasn’t seasickness. Then we’d waded in, and I heard a thump against the chest of the man beside me. He stopped as if he’d forgotten something on the LAV as a stain blossomed on the front of his uniform. The sand puffed up in front of me from a bullet aimed too low, and I felt in that moment something of what I’d felt in football games after the first hit, the first smear of blood on my jersey. The fear was still there, but it was muted, like the sound of the crowd is once the game starts. Even my bad knee didn’t seem to slow me down. I ran for the tree line like a wingback zig-zagging to avoid tacklers. I made it but was still gasping the watery tropical air when a Japanese soldier raised up ten yards in front of me. I aimed for his heart and I found it.
    In the three weeks before a bullet pierced my lung and sent me back home, I’d killed at least three other men.
    ‘I’m giving you this deputy’s job because you know if it comes to the have-to you can kill a man,’ Sheriff McLeod had told me after I got back to Seneca.
    ‘Yes Sir,’ I’d answered, glad to have a