The Maid's Version Read Online Free PDF

was again a well-to-do DeGeer from Lampasas with daily feasts, horses to the horizon, cattle spread beyond, petticoats falling in a white drift beside any bed he rested on.
    Alma fled at fifteen, sorrowful to leave Mother behind with little Ruby and that old drinking man, crying as she ran, but positive-sure she’d strangle herself before midnight with a barbed-wire strand if she didn’t start running today, this minute, get to town, tear open a new life and crawl inside.
    Ruby had it worse. She was allowed no schooling at all, and Cecil in his dotage had become fond of the whip. He applied lashes to both Ruby and her mother and shouted his point of view while they ducked or cowered. Despite being half-nosed and forever working, Mother stood accused of lying with strangers, probably at creekside while Cecil slept, since he’d pondered on the porch and convinced himself that pretty little Ruby must be the spawn of a fornication that had not included him. In looks she did not favor Cecil or any kin he ever saw and that made her nothing but a mouth to feed, an ass to beat, a young body of no relation he could sometimes let his hands rub on the buds and rump and linger until his breathing thickened and he had to lie down next to the whore, her mother, for a piddling relief.
    It was grim living and those years made indelible memories that would never die or even fade enough to be misremembered. Flashes of recall would forever plague Ruby, those stunning jagged flashes that contain crushed feelings, certain smells, sorry pictures that fired unbidden into the mind and made her cringe, cringe, cringe, and she’d cry into her hands for an hour or go find a man she’d render weak with her smile and lead him straight to the shearing shed.
    Then came the morning Cecil did not wake but stretched purple in bed, tongue lolling, and soon enough after the farm was taken by the bank and Mother’s fortitude dispersed skyward in a single beam of dimming light. She’d lost her final ounce of oomph and was moved to the Work Farm, while Ruby, at age thirteen, was sent to town and Alma’s care. In very short order Alma found a live-in job for Ruby as an apprentice laundress and general helper at the home of Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Duxton, who had a large house on a good street, two teenaged sons, and plenty for a young girl to do.

M r. Arthur Glencross would eventually have a statue of his likeness placed in a position of honor on the town square. Glencross had many fine qualities and a pleasing manner he’d adopted as a teen and clung to throughout. He was born into a family of assistant merchants, that is, folks who did okay but spent their days as clerks in parlous (even torturous) proximity to those who owned the factory and did mighty damn well. The social distance between grated and Glencross was shaped early by the resentment his folks nurtured in private and shared with him in words, glances, facial expressions. He was a half-decent baseball player and an excellent student, one A+ (instead of a mere A–) shy of being valedictorian of his class. During deer season he went to a camp in the forest with his father and cronies, but he preferred fishing mountain streams alone. His only dates in high school were with daughters of his mother’s close friends and none was memorable or repeated. His folks did without luxuries, scrimped and saved, and he was sent to the state university at Columbia. There he lived in a quiet rooming house of dour scholars and achieved the honor roll, heard John Cowper Powys give a lecture on the meaning of art that enlarged his mind, saw Mabel Normand wave a long-stemmed rose from a touring car, and became deeply smitten with a large and brilliant girl at Stephens College who had to be reminded of his name every time they met. Business reversals required that he return home after applying two and a half years toward a four-year degree, and he did so with hangdog reluctance but quickly took a job at Citizens’