The Early Stories of Truman Capote Read Online Free PDF

park. There were only a few women there with their baby carriages. She collapsed onto one of the empty benches and hugged her aching side. After a while, it stopped hurting. She opened her big green Latin book, and behind its protective covers, began to cry softly, unconsciously fingering the gold key chain in her lap.

Miss Belle Rankin

I was eight the first time I saw Miss Belle Rankin. It was a hot August day. The sun was waning in the scarlet-streaked sky, and the heat was rising dry and vibrant from the earth.
    I sat on the steps of the front porch, watching an approaching negress, and wondered how she could ever carry such a huge bundle of laundry on the top of her head. She stopped and in reply to my greeting, laughed, that dark, drawling negro laughter. It was then Miss Belle came walking slowly down the opposite side of the street. The washerwoman saw her, and as if suddenly frightened stopped in the middle of a sentence and moved hurriedly on to her destination.
    I stared long and hard at this passing stranger who could cause such odd behavior. She was small and clothed all in black, dusty and streaked—she looked unbelievably old and wrinkled. Thin gray wisps of hair lay across her forehead, wet with perspiration. She walked with her head down and stared at the unpaved sidewalk, almost as if she were looking for something she had lost. An old black and tan hound followed her, moving aimlessly in the traces of his mistress.
    I saw her many times afterwards, but that first vision, almost like a dream, will always remain the clearest—Miss Belle, walking soundlessly down the street, little clouds of red dust rising about her feet as she disappeared into the dusk.
    A few years later I was sitting in Mr. Joab’s corner drugstore, swigging on one of Mr. Joab’s special milk shakes. I was down at one end of the counter, and up at the other sat two of the town’s well-known drugstore cowboys and a stranger.
    This stranger was much more respectable in appearance than the people who usually came into Mr. Joab’s. But it was what he was saying in a slow, husky voice, that caught my attention.
    “Do you boys know anybody around here with some nice Japonica trees for sale? I’m collecting some for an Eastern woman building a place over in Natchez.”
    The two boys looked at one another, and then one of them, who was fat with huge eyes and fond of taunting me, said, “Well, I tell you, Mister, the only person I know of around here that has some real purty ones is a queer old doll, Miss Belle Rankin—she lives about a half mile out from here in a right weird lookin’ place. It’s old and run down, built sometime before the Civil War. Mighty queer, though, but if Japonicas is what you’re lookin’ for, she’s got the nicest I ever peeked at.”
    “Yeah,” piped up the other boy, who was blond and pimply, and the fat boy’s stooge. “She oughta sell them to you. From what I hear she’s starvin’ to death out there—ain’t got nothin’ ’cept an old nigger that lives on the place and hoes around in a weed patch they call the garden. Why, the other day I hear, she walked into the Jitney Jungle market and went around pickin’ out the old spoiled vegetables and makin’ Olie Peterson give ’em to her. Queerest lookin’ witch you ever seen—looks like she might be a hunnerd in the shade. The niggers are so scared of her—”
    But the stranger interrupted the boy’s torrent of information and asked, “Well then, you think she might sell?”
    “Sure,” said the fat boy, with the smirk of certain knowledge on his face.
    The man thanked them and started to walk out, then suddenly turned around and said, “How would you boys like to ride out there and show me where it is? I’ll bring you back afterwards.”
    The two loafers quickly assented. That kind was always anxious to be seen in cars, especially with strangers; it made it seem like they had connections, and, anyway, there were the inevitable