Sweet Land Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

drunk. He would sleep through the whole thing in the stable, and that’s where they found him with his arms wrapped like a lover’s arms around an empty can of kerosene.
             
    THE PLAN WAS for me to stay behind for a few days just to keep an eye on things. We have pulled off something prodigious that will go down in the books, Mama said. But that means all sorts of people will be flocking here and you can never tell when the unexpected arises. Of course everything will be fine, but if there’s something more we have to do you will know it.
    Yes, Aunt Dora.
    Aunt Dora was just for here, Earle.
    Yes, Mama.
    Of course, even if there was no need to keep an eye out you would still have to wait for Miss Czerwinska.
    This is where I didn’t understand her thinking. The one bad thing in all of this is that Winifred would read the news in the Chicago papers. There was no safe way I could get in touch with her now that I was dead. That was it, that was the end of it. But Mama had said it wasn’t necessary to get in touch with Winifred. This remark made me angry.
    You said you liked her, I said.
    I do, Mama said.
    You called her our friend, I said.
    She is.
    I know it can’t be helped, but I wanted to marry Winifred Czerwinska. What can she do now but dry her tears and maybe light a candle for me and go out and find herself another boyfriend.
    Oh, Earle, Earle, Mama said, you know nothing about a woman’s heart.
             
    BUT ANYHOW , I followed the plan to stay on a few days and it wasn’t that hard with a dark stubble and a different hat and a long coat. There were such crowds nobody would notice anything that wasn’t what they’d come to see, that’s what a fever was in these souls. Everyone was streaming down the road to see the tragedy. They were in their carriages and they were walking and standing up in drays—people were paying for anything with wheels to get them out there from town—and after the newspapers ran the story, they were coming not just from La Ville and the neighboring farms but from out of state in their automobiles and on the train from Indianapolis and Chicago. And with the crowds came the hawkers to sell sandwiches and hot coffee, and peddlers with balloons and little flags and whirligigs for the children. Someone had taken photographs of the laid out skeletons in their crusts of burlap and printed them up as postcards for mailing, and these were going like hotcakes.
    The police had been inspired by the charred remains they found in the basement to look down the well and then to dig up the chicken yard and the floor of the stable. They had brought around a rowboat to dredge the water hole. They were really very thorough. They kept making their discoveries and laying out what they found in neat rows inside the barn. They had called in the county sheriff and his men to help with the crowds and they got some kind of order going, keeping people in lines to pass them by the open barn doors so everyone would have a turn. It was the only choice the police had if they didn’t want a riot, but even then the oglers went around back all the way up the road to get into the procession again—it was the two headless remains of Madame Dora and her nephew that drew the most attention, and of course the wrapped bundles of the little ones.
    There was such heat from this population that the snow was gone from the ground and on the road and in the yard and behind the house and even into the fields where the trucks and automobiles were parked everything had turned to mud so that it seemed even the season was transformed. I just stood and watched and took it all in, and it was amazing to see so many people with this happy feeling of spring, as if a population of creatures had formed up out of the mud especially for the occasion. That didn’t help the smell any, though no one seemed to notice. The house itself made me sad to look at, a smoking ruin that you could see the sky through. I had