The Neon Bible Read Online Free PDF Page A

pushing it along. But she either went the wrong way or did something wrong so that I ended up playing by myself while she just sat and stared at some nothing in the sky. One day she got a letter from George, but she just tore it up when she took it out of the mailbox and read the handwriting. I found out it was from him when I got older and could read and found it taped together in her dresser drawer. I never read what it said, because I had been taught not to do that kind of thing, but I was always curious about it. In eighth grade I found out what happened. George hadn't really left town but had been arrested by the sheriff on a morals charge because some girl's mother made some kind of complaint.
    So here I am riding on this train. It's still dark out except for neon signs we pass sometimes. The last town went by too fast for me to see the name. The clicking on the rails is getting faster, and I can see the trees crossing the moon quick now. The years before I went to school passed by just about as quick as those trees are passing by the moon.
     
     
     
    Two
     
    Then we moved. Something went wrong at the factory and Poppa lost his job, so we had to move to an old farmhouse-like house up on a hill right where the town ended.
    It was a tan and brown place, but the paint was so faded you couldn't tell what color it was at first. There were so many rooms that we locked plenty of them up and never used them, and the whole place made me think of the hotel down in town, except it wasn't quite so large. The furniture in the other house came with the price of the rent, so we really didn't have any of our own worth mentioning, just things like the toilet seat Aunt Mae bought when she said the old one pinched.
    About the saddest place was the living room, really the front room, with only an old couch Mother got from some friends and two old-fashioned chairs of Aunt Mae's. At first we didn't have any curtains, but Aunt Mae had some beautiful old stage costumes that she tore up to use instead. I can't say that they looked bad, though, even if they weren't wide or long enough for the big windows. Every window in the front room had a different curtain. The big one that looked onto the porch had one made out of an evening dress with big pink roses and lace. On one of the smaller windows Aunt Mae put a curtain she made out of a shroud she wore in some murder play, and on the other one she had a red satin costume from a minstrel show. When the sun came through all three windows, it made the room so red and bright that Poppa said it reminded him of hell, and he would never sit with us in there. I think this was because the curtains were Aunt Mae's costumes, too, and he didn't want the sun to shine on him through them.
    Upstairs in the bedrooms we had some old beds someone had left in the house, and they were so hard and smelled so much that I never fell asleep till I had tossed around for about an hour. Anybody who got close to them could tell that they must have been used by little children ever since they were built. Aunt Mae got sick from the smell of her mattress the first night we slept there. She slept on the couch that night and then threw all of her powder on her bed the next day.
    Inside the house there wasn't much more to see, but you could see almost the whole country from the front porch. You could see our town down at the bottom of the hills, and over from the side of the porch you could see the county seat pretty well on clear days, and you could tell where it was anytime if you looked for the factory smokestack, because it was painted orange. There was a big black mark on it that was a big R when you got close to it. It stood for Renning, the people who owned the factory. I always remember the smokestack because Poppa would sit on the porch and look at it and say, "Those Rennings are the people that are keeping us poor. Damn those rich buggers. They're the ones keeping this whole valley poor, them and the damn politicians