The Americans Are Coming Read Online Free PDF

Lounsbury’s in Newcastle. Dan Brennen owed for the battery radio he listened to every night.
    The men left and when they were a step further than an earshot away, Dan Brennen said, “Boy, she’s a hard lookin’ ticket, ain’t she?”
    “Hard lookin’ ticket, yeah. Oh yeah, that’s right, Dan old boy, old chummy pard, yeah, hard lookin’ ticket, yeah.” Lindon Tucker agreed with everything anybody said.
    Back in the post office, Shirley sorted the rest of the mail: a letter for Helen MacDonald, a bill for Bob Nash, the
Family Herald
for Bernie Hanley and a bill for Lester Burns. She placed the mail in their rightful compartments, then opened the cash box and commenced counting the money inside. Twelve dollars and sixty cents.
    Then, she counted her stamp supply. Eight ten-centers, six five-centers and nineteen two-centers.
    She went into the kitchen, knelt before the only wall adornment in the house, the crucifix, and prayed. “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women . . .”
    That night the family ate baloney and potatoes for supper. No one questioned where the food had fallen from, and only Shirley knew for sure.
    *
    Thursday night, the twentieth of March, Bert Todder was watering his horse, Queen, by the light of a kerosene lantern, when he heard the strange cry from the forest. It was a lonesome call that resembled nothing he had ever heard. It sounded neither human nor animal and it couldn’t have been a train whistle; the railroad was in the opposite direction.
    He was about to shrug it off as a car horn, when it came again . . . again . . . and again.
    “It’s comin’ from back on Todder Brook,” he said to Queen. “No cars back on Todder Brook. It’s not a car horn anyway.”
    Queen didn’t answer, sighed contentedly and continued to drink.
    Lindon Tucker was seeing a man about a horse, which was his term for having a piss behind the shed, when he also heard the eerie call.
    Both Lindon and Bert, as well as John Kaston and Dan Brennen, heard it on Friday night. On Saturday night, because nothing is ever kept secret in Brennen Siding, everyone in the settlement was out beneath the stars listening to the still unidentified scream from the distant forest.
    Saturday night was the first night in Brennen Siding’s history that every door was locked.
    It was heard again on Sunday night, but only for a few moments.
    On Monday evening, fifteen men and boys stood around in Bernie Hanley’s store, eating oranges and drinking Sussex ginger ale.
    On Monday evening in Bernie Hanley’s store, the conversation was not about Joe Louis, the Saturday night jamboree, or the price of pulp wood. On Monday evening in Bernie Hanley’s store, the conversation was not about Shirley Ramsey and Ford cars; nor did the men dwell on gold in the Yukon, or horses. Monday evening, the conversation rambled around everything from rabbits crying to the eerie screams of the eastern cougar; from the strange and numerous variations in the fox’s bark, to ghosts and the devil.
    “I wouldn’t take a million dollars for goin’ into thatwoods over there tonight,” said Bob Nash. “Not even with me .303.”
    “No, sir! A panther kin climb and he’d git ya from a tree. Ya’d not know he was there till ’e was on top o’ ya,” put in Bert Todder. The panther was the cat that everyone decided upon. It somehow sounded better than cougar.
    “Me? I don’t think we’re dealin’ wit’ a pant’er at all,” began Stan Tuney. Stan Tuney always ate his oranges with the peel still on them. That’s how they ate them in the Yukon, he’d been told. “I was back Todder Brook last Tuesday and I must’ve seen a thousand moose tracks. The biggest moose tracks I ever seen!”
    “Are you sayin’ we got us a moose runnin’ round through the woods blattin’ his head off, Stan?” asked Bert.
    “I’d say t’was a panther, meself. Me father always said that the Dungarvon whooper was a panther!”
    “There ain’t been a