The Outcasts Read Online Free PDF

of her life up to that moment had been a torment, a restlessness of mind, as though her brain were a frightened, overly large fish inside a brittle bowl. His near-ecstatic study of her eyes dancing on the edge of nothingness had in the instant changed that balance, rendering her mind becalmed and her body agitating for even a careless, wounding touch.
    When she had quieted, he undressed and lay back on the bed, then ran his nose along her skin as though sniffing out the source of the illness. Then he touched her for a length of time and brought her to another kind of shuddering.
    A sudden, hard knock at the door signaled the hotel woman’s return with the hot water, and Lucinda called her in. The woman closed the door behind her and walked farther into the room before she realized that Lucinda was naked in the bath. She drew herself up short, quickly turning her head away in embarrassment, her face pinched and disapproving. Lucinda asked her to bring the bucket closer, and, as the woman drew near, Lucinda, smiling sweetly, let her knees draw apart to the sides of the basin, showing through the shallow water the private hair between her legs. Dropping the bucket onto the floor, the woman fled the room.
    Lucinda finished her bath and dressed in the clean, heavier woolen dress from her bag. She would buy more dresses in Houston and so left the soiled cotton dress behind in the room. Before leaving, she spoke with the hotel clerk, an aging man with inflamed red eyes, and asked him about the dangers of riding the ferry to Galveston. If the German happened to find his way this far south, there was no harm in pointing the trail away from her true destination.
    Lucinda boarded the train’s passenger car behind a stout, respectable-looking woman with two small children. She sat facing the little family and smiled pleasantly at them. The ride would be six hours, and she settled back on the bench to look out of the window. The train lurched twice and then slowly began to gain momentum once it had passed the abandoned cotton gin on the outskirts of town.
    A few miles south, they slowed for a bridge crossing, and a man in a long frock coat and feathering silver beard walked from the underpass and came to stand near the tracks. He held up a large board as the train’s passenger cars came abreast of him. Printed with hand-blocked letters, the board read God Is Coming. But He Is Not Here Yet.
    The woman clucked in agreement and, speaking with the heavy accent of some distant place, told Lucinda she was going to Houston to be married, her first husband having died the year before. She had been a lady’s maid once, but after the chaos and ruin of the war, she had been hired by an undertaker to do the hair and face-painting of the dead. Business had been very good for a few years, but of late the undertaker’s establishment had gone into a decline. She still had nightmares of the dead coming to life and grabbing her around the wrist as she worked on them, but she told Lucinda, “One does what one must to live.”
    Lucinda agreed with her. The woman soon fell asleep with the rocking of the train, and Lucinda looked out the window again at the slanting light blazing the grasslands and prairies and thought, Yes, one does what one must.

Chapter 4
    N ate looked east across rolling terrain carved deep with escarpments and punctured by thorn grasses, mesquite, and cholla, the thorns of which seemed to leap off the cactus onto passing horse or man. He remembered thinking on his initial ride to Franklin that he had never seen such country. He had been through the Big Thicket and longleaf piney woods of East Texas, gone farther east into the wilds of Arkansas, with its mountains of boulders and sheer drop-away cliffs. And he’d been over the vast expanses of Oklahoma, where he was born, the surface planes of which seemed often molded to a concavity, such was the weight of its flatness.
    In Oklahoma, the ground had always appeared to him to be