Quiet-Crazy Read Online Free PDF

too mad at Mama and Sheriff Tate both, but when Daddy tells the sheriff to wait a minute and he goes out to the garden to bring me a mum, a solid white mum with flecks of red splashed over it, I can’t help but cry. Why, Daddy, why can’t you do something about me going off with Sheriff Tate? Doesn’t it even matter to you that I’m going off with this noaccountsheriff that you just can’t stand? Couldn’t you even make a polite offer to ride down with me? Oh, I know you can’t ride that far. But couldn’t you at least appear, just out of care for me, to be concerned just a little bit?
    Poor Daddy. I want so to put my arms around him and hold him to me, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Daddy and me stopped hugging long ago, when I was about ten or eleven. It seemed he got to be too embarrassed, or I did one, I couldn’t ever figure out which one of us it was. So, while I’m longing something awful to reach out the door to hug him, I close the door between us like I’m closing it forever, and I wave at him instead, my feelings all twisted up like long strands of rope reaching from here to eternity, having no beginning and no end.
    â€œTake it easy, now,” Daddy says, as we start to pull out of the yard, and I can’t tell if he’s talking to me about my crying, or if he’s talking to Sheriff Tate about his driving.
    As we drive off I hate that I ever started in to crying, because when I start, it takes me forever to stop. I hate, too, that Sheriff Tate hasn’t seen fit to take that little fencelike divider down over the back of his seat. Does he think I’m dangerous? That I’m going to come charging over the seat and try to attack him, like he did me in the graveyard?
    The minute we hit the road he starts in. “Where you been for the past few Sundays, Lizzy-buth? What you going off to Nathan for, a ni-i-ce girl like you? Huh?” And he laughs,evil-sounding. “I didn’t know ni-i-ce girls went to Nathan, Lizzy-buth. I thought Nathan was just for crazy folks. Wild people. You not done and gone crazy now are you? Huh?”
    Now I pretend the divider is solid concrete, so I can neither hear nor see him. Then I turn and look out the window at Littleton passing away. Since there’s not much to it, it goes quickly, over and down a hill street, lined with white shoe-box houses, into the valley where lies the primary school, post office, the Frostee-Burg and the pants factory, and up another house-lined hill street, climaxed at the top with the white-steepled church.
    â€œWhy don’t you put that there flower in your hair, Lizzy-buth?” says Sheriff Tate. “It’d look mighty pretty, don’t you think? Flowers look pretty on ni-i-ce girls. Especially ones like you.”
    When he sees I’m not striking up any conversation with him, he flips on the radio to WHEN, the station that plays that old whiny country music that I can’t stand. Some country music man is moaning that he’s drowning in his beer ’cause he’s thinking about his dear who said good-bye, and all he does is sit and cry. It’s enough to make me stop crying, to think I might be sounding anything like him. Lord, if I have to listen to that stuff for three hours, I sure will be crazy by the time we get to Nathan.

3
. . . . . .
    E ven though I don’t like Sheriff Tate . . . no, that’s too mild. But what can I say? “Hate”?
Hate?
Hate has never been in my vocabulary when it comes to people. At least I don’t think it has. But that’s what keeps coming to mind, yes, hate, yes, yes, yes, and yes, again, hate. Even though I hate, I repeat hate Sheriff Tate with a passion, for some reason I thought that when we got to Nathan he would walk into that hospital with me. If not because it was a law that he had to go with me, then at least he’d go out of some small bit of kindness in him. But no, he just stops in