The Third Life of Grange Copeland Read Online Free PDF

empty house he took only his box. As he left the clearing a thousand birds began wildly singing good luck.

Part II

4
    H E WALKED IN the direction the sun was going. He walked all day without stopping, except to throw a rock into a stream and to watch squirrels play across the tops of trees, twisting and flying among the branches as if they had wings. Under his feet the earth, being moist with spring, became sunken; he stopped to watch as the print of his foot sprang back to smoothness on the moss along the streams. Rivers and creeks crisscrossed his route, and everything he saw in the woods delighted him. When it became dark he made himself a bed in a shed in a big field, a shed used for storing cotton to keep it dry after picking. The shed was empty now, but he found a few discarded croker sacks outside. On these he lay down and went to sleep.
    After walking a few miles next morning he was very hungry. He walked past farmhouses that were big and painted white, with shrubs and flowering trees around them. When he saw a baked gray two-room shack he quickened his pace and walked for its flat dry yard.
    There was a woman standing in the back yard over a rusty black pot. Her fire was kept going with rubber tires and refuse. The air around her was smelly and smoky. She was stirring her boiling clothes with a long lye-eaten stick. She took the stick out of the water and shook it as Brownfield came up to her. She looked about quickly to locate three small children, who were playing with car tires all over the yard, and didn’t say a word or even seem to notice him until he spoke.
    “’Morning,” he said.
    “All right … how’re you?” she answered in a low, singsong voice.
    “Nice bright morning, ain’t it?”
    “Shore is,” she said and stopped.
    “My name Brownfield—Brownfield Copeland—and what might yourn be?”
    “My name Mizes Mamie Lou Banks glad to know you.” She stuck out a bleached and puckered white palm and they shook hands.
    “I wonder if a starving man might ax a lady for a little somethin’ to eat?” said Brownfield, looking sideways at her as if she were not the lady he meant.
    “Why,” she said, putting down the stick, placing it across the pot, “you is just a boy, ain’t you?”
    “Yessem, I reckon,” he said, unconsciously hanging his head.
    “You runnin’ from any white peoples? If you is,” she continued, not looking at him but down at her pot, “you best to go on in the house where can’t none of them see you if they’s a mind to pass. They’s some grits on the stove ’n some eggs if you knows how to cook. I got my washin’ to do, ’n if you is runnin’ from the white folks I ain’t seen nothing but potash ’n lye this morning, ’n that’s the truth.” She smiled very slightly, at least her mouth quivered about the corners. There was a chunky bulge in her bottom lip.
    “Thank you kindly, ma’am, I ain’t runnin’ but I shore is hongry. Fact of the matter is, I’m kinda lookin’ for my daddy.”
    “Was the white folks after him too?” she asked. “Or did he just run off?”
    “It was both.”
    “Well, I can’t picture nobody runnin’ back this way.”
    Brownfield nodded and walked to the door she shook her fingers at and went in. While he was cooking the eggs she came through the house to get more dirty clothes. He thought she must be a washerwoman, she was washing so many clothes.
    “Hep yourself now,” she said. There was something stern in her kindness. He thought that if she had ever been good-looking it must have been when she was no more than eleven or twelve.
    “Oh, I got plenty.”
    “I tell you, a growin’ boy can eat it up like a brand-new stove.”
    “You got children bigger’n them outdoors?”
    “Oh, five more, but they all be gone up Norse.” She said it proudly, as if she were saying she sent them off to Harvard. “They says they couldn’t just hang round here and hang round here.” She paused a minute, going to the china