Original Sins Read Online Free PDF

Christ, he ain’t setting downstairs.”
    Donny was looking down and poking the toe of one high-topped black tennis shoe into a crack in the fake marble flooring. The other four exchanged glances. They’d never noticed the side staircase.
    Finally Donny mumbled, “Yawl gwan. I meet you down here after.”
    â€œWe’ll all sit in the balcony,” announced Emily.
    â€œYou’ll miss the reward,” Donny said in a whisper.
    â€œThat’s right,” said Jed. “Listen, Donny, we’ll get you one too, hear?”
    Donny nodded and headed for the back stairs. After the newsreel, a film of the Stars and Stripes rippling in a breeze came on the screen. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Everyone stood, hands over hearts.
    Back in the Castle Tree as they chewed Turkish Taffy and discussed what they would have done to the hideous green thing from Mars, no one could look at Donny.
    â€œWell, shoot,” Jed said finally. “I love the balcony. It’s neat sitting up high like that.”
    Donny shrugged.
    â€œWhen I reach the top plateau,” announced Emily, “I’m gonna buy that theater and give you and your grandmaw a lifetime free pass for up front.”
    They heard leaves crunching below as someone approached the base of the tree. Looking down, they saw Mr. Fulton, grey and stooped. He called up through cupped hands, “Yall come on down out of my tree now, hear? Yall too old to be climbing around in trees. These branches can’t hold you. I’m sick of worrying about you. Gwan home now and do your lessons.”
    The boys began spending time crawling around vacant fields on knees and elbows, cradling imaginary rifles. When Emily and Sally would try to join them, they’d lob pretend hand grenades at them, pulling the pins with their teeth. The only day they let the girls play, they tied them down and dripped water on their foreheads until they confessed irritably to sabotage. The boys got army patches out of cereal boxes and nagged their mothers into sewing them on their wind-breakers.
    That summer at the carnival Raymond and Donny and Jed spent a lot of time looking at the posters of nearly naked women outside the show tent. Emily and Sally tried to persuade them to come look at the hot dog machine: A live dog was fed into one end; after much barking and howling, strings of wieners came out the other end. But the boys chased them off. Emily and Sally ended up at a nearby booth pretending to be interested in tossing pennies into milk bottles. Occasionally laughter would drift over. “Look,” Jed said, “it says she shoots Ping-Pong balls into the audience.” The three boys collapsed in giggles.
    â€œWhat’s so funny about that?” Emily demanded of Sally. “What’s so funny about Ping-Pong balls? I don’t get it.”
    Sally shook her head. “I think they’ve gone plumb crazy.”
    The following winter no one shot down mistletoe. Each got only a shower of dead leaves and twigs. The hut in the woods fell in on its treasures, and no one came to prop it up. Raspberry canes grew up around the mouth of the powder magazine. Younger children perched in the Castle Tree and chattered like monkeys. Emily and Raymond, as they strolled home along the sidewalk from the white junior high school, separately, with new friends, pretended not to hear the eager voices from the top of the tree.

Chapter One
A Team That’s on the Beam
    At the pep rally for the game against the Bledsoe Station Bulldogs, Sally and another cheerleader dragged the Newland Pioneers’ Terrorizing Machine into center court, while the band played “Hot Time in the Old Town.” It was a large, elaborately painted cardboard crate. Into one end they put a bulldog wearing a cloth saddle in Bledsoe High’s colors, navy blue and white.
    The band’s song ended abruptly. Emily lowered her flute and watched the box. From