The People in the Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

caper berries.) Therefore, whenever he did evince some sort of emotion, it was cause for alarm, or at least curiosity. In fact, I remember his expression from that morning—a mix of surprise, consternation, and bewilderment—rather better than I do his actual face.
    “Your mother’s dead,” said my father. He sounded calm and grave, and he spoke in normal tones, which belied his expression—indeed, his voice reassured me.
    “Really, Joseph,” said Reverend Cunningham.
    “It’s best he hear it this way, straightforward,” said my father. He had looked directly at me to tell me the news. Now he looked away and spoke to somewhere over Reverend Cunningham’s head. “I assume you’ll take care of the body, Reverend. Do whatever … she wanted done.” Then he slapped his hands together once, in a neat, conclusive gesture, and wandered out the back door into the yard. Lester, after giving me a long, dolorous look, trotted out after him, leaving me with Reverend Cunningham, who sighed, and John Naples, who scowled.
    “You!” Naples said to me. “Don’t you have a brother someplace?”
    He knew I did. The previous summer, Owen and I had trapped a mess of green grass snakes and fed them, one slithery strand at a time, through Naples’s clinic’s letter box. It was a bit of childish fun, but he had been enraged and had never forgiven us. He was a bitter, angry man, made corrosive by his disappointment with the world, the sort of man who on the street kicked up puffs of dust in the direction of children simply because he knew they’d have few means of retaliation. “Aren’t you interested to know how your mother expired?” he asked me.
    “Naples!” said Reverend Cunningham.
    Naples ignored Father Cunningham. “Those mosquitoes that crowd around your creek,” he continued. “It’s my medical opinion that they carry a strain of Chinese flu. Mosquitoes carry disease, and your mother wandered into a cesspool of teeming bacteria and caused her own demise.” He leaned back against his chair, satisfied, and puffed on his pipe. “And if you and your brother don’t avoid that creek, you’ll meet with the same death.”
    Reverend Cunningham looked aghast. “Really, Naples,” he said, and then, having exhausted his resources on that one rebuke, he left through the back door as well. I was not surprised, and had expected little from him—not simply because he was a minister, but because he looked so diminished. He had the sort of face that was memorable for its absences rather than its presences: cheeks so gaunt and cadaverous that it looked as if someone had reached in, scooped out the meat in two quick movements, and sent him on his way.
    Naples shrugged. He, unlike the others, seemed to have no intention of leaving. Owen and I had noticed that when we talked to adults as if they were a bit slow, even inferior—as if they were nuisances we’d learned to tolerate—they were often shocked into giving us information and speaking to us in tones they would never normally use with a child. Such a technique, however, did not have the sameeffect on Naples; his arrogance had lent him a sort of immovability that proved very inconvenient.
    “What the devil is the Chinese flu?” I began.
    Naples puffed away. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said rudely.
    “I think you made it up.”
    “And I think you’re an insolent brat. You and your brother both.”
    “You did make it up, didn’t you?”
    “Watch yourself, boy.”
    “But what is it?”
    There were a few more rounds of this—me asking, Naples threatening—until he finally sighed and yielded. “A kind of airborne disease spread by mosquitoes. One bit your mother and she got sick and died.” It seemed a logical explanation, and I was quiet. For a minute we sat in silence, each of us, I imagine, contemplating her somehow disappointing demise. But then Naples remembered how he had been manipulated into answering my question and recovered himself.