Stepping Stones Read Online Free PDF Page A

by a long shot.  I used to hear Ma and Pa fighting late at night, long after Georgie and I were supposed to be asleep.
    Mostly they fought about Georgie.
    “It ain’t right, a boy being able to do what he does,” I heard Pa say one night.  “If anybody was to find out, it wouldn’t go easy on us.  They’d probably burn us out.  Maybe worse.”
    “What do you want to do, John?” Ma asked softly.  “Turn him in?”
    “No, nothin’ like that,” Pa answered quickly.  “But for the life of me, I don’t understand why God saw fit to burden us with an abomination.”
    Ma wasn’t partial to the beliefs some folks held—especially if those beliefs led to somebody getting hurt—and that kind of talk got her riled.  Ma and Pa went at it in earnest after that.
    I was eight at the time, but old enough to know they weren’t fighting about Georgie’s being slow.  It was because he could make things move.
    Ma said it wasn’t God or Satan that caused it.  It was the poison.  After the war it seeped into the ground and got carried by the water till it was just about everywhere—not just the big cities, but everywhere—and odd things began to happen.  I’ve seen pictures in Grandpa’s books of two-headed babies and the like.  Some of the livestock births were even stranger, and there were other things as well.  You’d hear rumors every once in a while about happenings that most of our neighbors considered against God and nature.  Things like what Georgie could do.
    One day Pa caught Georgie and me playing a game down by the creek.  We were winging mud clods at an empty whiskey jug on the opposite bank.  Georgie had it floating unsupported a couple feet over the ground.  He was making it jump back and forth so no matter where we threw, we almost always scored a hit.  We were laughing so hard we didn’t hear Pa approaching .
    Pa came out of the woods and saw what we were doing.  He put the belt to both of us, then dragged us crying back to Ma.
    After sending Pa away, Ma sat us down on the hearth.  Sitting didn’t feel especi ally good after the licking Pa had just given us, but we sat anyway.  I was mad.  Georgie was crying.  He didn’t understand what we had done wrong.
    Ma put her arm around him.  I remember she didn’t seem angry, just concerned.  It was as though she had been expecting it.  “I’m going to tell you boys a story,” she said, speaking softly like she always did when she had something important to say.  We leaned closer to hear.
    “Georgie, do you know what a monkey is?” she asked.
    “You mean like the picture in Grandpa’s book?” Georgie sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
    “Right.  A monkey’s an animal that lived a long time ago, long before the Change.”
    “Are there any left?” I asked, glad the conversation seemed to have veered from our game on the bank.
    “I don’t know, honey,” Ma answered.  “Maybe somewhere.  Anyway, monkeys used to live together in groups.  Each group was big, like our family and all our neighbors put together.  Understand, Georgie?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Good.  Now, all the monkeys in the group knew one other, and they all got along fine, like a big family.  Then one day some men caught one of the young er monkeys in a trap.  They poked and teased him.  When they tired of that, they decided to play a trick.  They mixed up a big bucket of green d ye and dumped it on him.  T hey left him in the trap all day.  When the monkey was finally dry, his fur had turned bright green.  T hen t he men let him go, laughing at him as he ran back into the forest to rejoin his group.
    “Can you guess what happened next, Georgie?  No?  Well, the other monkeys wouldn’t let him come back.  Even his own brothers and sisters wouldn’t accept him.  They drove him out.”
    By then Georgie had stopped crying.  “Why, Mama?” he asked.  “Didn’t they know him?”
    “Oh, they knew him,” Ma said slowly.  “It was just