One Monday We Killed Them All Read Online Free PDF Page B

and so she had started herding and hauling the children back, and perhaps could have gotten little Shirley out of the way, too, had she not slipped and skinned her knee. Had she not been there, it was possible the rear of the car would have hit a half dozen of them. The driver had handled his car badly, had frozen on the wheel, the brakes locked, after the skid started.
    Finally I had nothing left to write. I had her name andher address and her telephone number, and my notes on all the information she could give me. So I had to look at her. She was so close. I had the hesitancy you get when you are tempted to look directly at the flame of a welding torch. If I thanked her, it was over.
    I looked at her. There was a great calmness about this woman.
    “This address, Miss McAran. Do you—live with your folks?”
    “What has that got to do with the accident, Officer?”
    I considered inventing some nonsense about how the phone was listed and so on. I discarded it. I looked into those bottle-green eyes.
    “Absolutely nothing.”
    It was a challenge, and I saw it weighed and accepted. There was an aspect to this that you will not understand unless you grew up in an area where there are hills and flats, and people have lived there for a long, long time. Nowadays the differences are not as great, but they still exist and will probably always exist. Hill people think themselves tougher, shrewder, more realistic and more rebellious than the soft, conformist flatlanders. They compare their hard core of verbal honesty against the tricky legalistic antics of the flatlanders. They have a rooted distaste for all the symbols of authority. I am told it is this way all over the world, wherever there are mountains and old cultures.
    We stared at each other across the fence our upbringing had erected between us. “Twenty-six Crown Street,” she said, “is a private home. Mrs. Duke rents rooms to schoolteachers. There are three of us there. She operates it as a small boardinghouse. I’ve lived there since school started in September. This is my first year of teaching. What else do you have to know?”
    She wore a dark gray skirt, a matching jacket over a green sweater, galoshes with buckles. She carried a gray cloth coat now placed across her lap. It looked cheap, threadbare and not nearly warm enough. She wore no rings, no watch, no jewelry at all. Her quiet hands rested on the cloth coat. The knuckles were chapped. Much later I learned she was self-conscious about the size of her hands and feet.
    It must be just this way when the officer of an army of occupation must question a civilian girl. There is challenge,awareness, and the kind of contempt you cannot put your finger on.
    I said, “A boy named Dwight McAran from this area plays for—”
    “He’s my half-brother.”
    “Do you have a car?”
    “No.”
    “My partner went off with the traffic officer and left me the patrol car. I’m going down to the hospital to check on the child. Do you want to come along?”
    “No thank you. She isn’t badly hurt.”
    “Can I give you a lift home?”
    “No thank you. I have work to do here.”
    “Maybe some evening we could—”
    She stood up. “I seldom go out, thank you.”
    I could not get her out of my mind. The image of her grew stronger rather than fading. I began calling her up. She was coldly gracious, politely declining every invitation. I tracked down people who could tell me something about her. It was not easy. I put a lot of pieces together. She had been born forty miles back in the hills in the tiny settlement of Keepsafe, the only daughter of Red McAran, a vast, wild raging man who had not lived long enough to have other daughters. Meg’s mother had died of meningitis when Meg was three months old. The tragedy had made her father more violent and unpredictable than ever. He had remarried, had come down to Brook City for his drunken week-end courtship of a Division Street slut, married the young dull-minded girl and