Savage Night Read Online Free PDF

something like that, he’d beat the tar out of us…Out of the others, I mean. I was only a baby.”
    “Yes? But I don’t understand why—”
    “It’s simple,” I said. “Anyway, it was simple enough to him. It seemed to him that we were trying to keep him in the mines. Keeping him from getting away. Using up stuff as fast as we could so that he’d have to stay down there under the ground…until he was buried under it.”
    Mr. Kendall tsk-tsk’ed again. “Wretched! Poor deluded fellow. As if you could help—”
    “We couldn’t help it,” I nodded, “but that didn’t make it any better for him. He had to work in the mines, and when a man has to do something he does it. But that doesn’t make it any easier. You might even say it was twice as hard that way. You’re not brave or noble or unselfish or any of the things a man likes to think he is. You’re just a cornered rat, and you start acting like one.”
    “Mmm. You seem to be an unusually introspective young man, Mr. Bigelow. You say your father died of drink?”
    “No,” I said. “He died in the mines. There was so much rock on top of him that it took a week to dig him out.”
    Mr. Kendall shoved off for the bakery after a few more tsks and how-terribles, and I went back in the house. Then I sauntered on back to the kitchen.
    She was bent over the sink, the crutch gripped under her armpit, washing what looked like about a thousand dishes. Apparently, Mrs. Winroy had saved them up for her while she’d been away—them and every other dirty job.
    I hung my coat over a chair and rolled up my sleeves. I picked up a big spoon and began scraping the pans out.
    I got them all scraped into one pan, and started for the back door with it.
    She hadn’t looked at me since I’d come into the room, and she didn’t look at me now. But she did manage to speak. The words came out in a rush like a kid who’s nerved to recite a poem and has to do it fast or not at all.
    “The g-garbage can’s at the side of the porch—”
    “You mean they don’t have any chickens?” I said. “Why, they ought to have some chickens to feed it to.”
    “Y-yes,” she said.
    “It’s a shame to waste food this way. With all the hungry people there are in the world.”
    “I—I think so, too,” she said, sort of breathless.
    That was all she was up to for the moment. She was blushing like a house afire, and her head was ducked so far over the sink I was afraid she would fall in. I took the garbage outside and scraped it out slowly.
    I knew how she felt. Why wouldn’t I know how it felt to be a kind of joke, to have people tell you off kind of like it was what you were made for? You never get used to it, but you get to where you don’t expect anything else.
    She was still pretty shocked by the idea of having talked to me when I went back inside. But being shocked didn’t keep her from liking it. She said I s-shouldn’t be helping her wipe the dishes—then, pointed out a towel to me. She said h-hadn’t I better put an apron on; she did it for me, her fingers trembling but lingering.
    We stood wiping the dishes together, our arms touching now and then. The first few times it happened, she jerked hers away like she’d brushed against a hot stove. Then, pretty soon, she wasn’t jerking away. And, once, when my elbow brushed her breast, it seemed to me that she sort of leaned into it.
    Studying her out of the corner of my eyes, I saw that I’d been right about her left hand. The fingers were splayed. She didn’t have the full use of it, and she kept trying to hide it from me. Even with that, though, and her leg—whatever was wrong with her leg—she had plenty on the ball.
    All that hard work and deep breathing had put breasts on her like daddy-come-to-church. And swinging around on that crutch hadn’t done her rear end any harm. If you saw it by itself, you might have thought it belonged to a Shetland pony. But I don’t mean it was big. It was the way it was put on