Power in the Blood Read Online Free PDF

way, see? You get back there among those good people and you pick someone, I don’t care who, it’s your choice, but you make it right quick or by God I’ll wring your scrawny neck. You understand me, boy?”
    “Yes …”
    “Go do what I said. I’ll be watching. I was you, I’d take the feller with the shaved face and his wife, she’s wearing blue. They look like righteous folk to me, but like I say, it’s up to you. Don’t be making fools of good people that’s suffered enough already from their loss. You’re no better than any of them here, and that’s a fact. Now go.”
    Clay wandered hopelessly back among the smiling faces. He’d intended making the Canbys take him still further west, then he’d jump from the train one night and make his own way to the Mississippi and get work on the riverboats. He knew now it wouldn’t happen. Mr. Canby had outsmarted him.
    It seemed easiest, considering his inner turmoil, to take the advice of the man who had proved himself smarter, and go with the couple suggested. Their look of surprise and relief as he approached them was pitiful.
    Clay gave them a lopsided grimace and was embraced.

4
    He usually tried to surprise her in the barn, while she gathered eggs hidden there by the hens. The eggs were always in the same place, and so was Hassenplug. “Got ’em all?” he’d say, and Zoe would nod, the basket held between herself and her foster father. Both knew that broken eggs would be questioned by Mrs. Hassenplug, so the basket was Zoe’s only defense.
    It had started when her breasts came. They were not particularly evident beneath her blouse, but they were there, and Hassenplug’s interest in her had escalated overnight, it seemed. First he’d pressed his hands over them in so casual a fashion Zoe thought it natural. “They have to be kept warm to grow,” he’d said, massaging the shallow mounds. This made sense to Zoe, who had often placed her own hands over her developing breasts in exactly the same way whenever they were sore, but Hassenplug’s smile alerted her to the incident’s unnatural overtones. After that first time, she backed away whenever his hands reached for her. It happened only when his wife was nowhere around; this made Zoe aware that her breasts (and presumably the monthly bleeding that had accompanied their arrival) had not only changed her, they had altered Hassenplug beyond all understanding.
    As a farm girl, Zoe knew that male creatures were equipped with a rod of flesh for the penetration of female creatures, and the principle applied also to humans. Until now, she had assumed the difference between animals and people lay in the state of matrimony that existed only in the latter, but Hassenplug was married to Mrs. Hassenplug, not to Zoe, so why did he want her to lift her skirts for him every time she gathered eggs? Wasn’t he able to lift Mrs. Hassenplug’s skirts? It was mystifying, and she hated going to the barn, previously one of her more enjoyable chores. Her father had spoiled the quiet business of egg gathering for Zoe, and it was for this, as well as the confusion his actions aroused in her, that she began to resent his existence.
    Zoe liked her mother well enough, although Mrs. Hassenplug had never paid much attention to her new daughter-beyond teaching her those things that needed to be taught—needlework; cooking; putting up preserves; yardwork; cleaning house, and so forth. It was Zoe’s impression that Mrs. Hassenplug wanted a boy, if only to please her husband, but had accepted her foster daughter as a useful substitute.
    “He’s still wanting a boy to pass the place on to,” her mother told Zoe. “Still trying, he is,” she lamented. It was some time before Zoe realized that Hassenplug’s “trying” meant mounting Mrs. Hassenplug and penetrating her private parts with his rod of flesh. Zoe knew that a son was considered superior to a daughter, in that property could be passed along down the male line,