The Third Life of Grange Copeland Read Online Free PDF Page B

closet for butter and putting it down next to his plate. “Don’t know if I blames them neither.” She was a very thin woman with knobby cheekbones and dark circles under her eyes. She had no more figure than a stick, and wore a man’s pair of overalls and a tight checkered headrag. “For all I know somebody just might be feeding my old hongry younguns up there in Chicago. I swear, they could eat up yere ’bout a whole hog at one dinner.” She sighed and walked outside with the clothes.
    Brownfield thought perhaps he would go to Chicago, or maybe even New York City. Maybe he would just keep walking and walking and then hop a freight and wake up in the morning in a place where people were nice and had manners. He wouldn’t even care if they didn’t have manners, if they didn’t try to lure him into debt and then cause him to turn into stone whenever they came around. He stopped chewing a moment to think about what his mother had said about up Norse; and he remembered that his cousins said that up Norse was cold and people never spoke to one another on the street or anything. His father had once said that being up Norse ruined Uncle Silas and Aunt Marilyn, being so cold and unfeeling and full of concrete, but even while Grange said this his eyes had shown a fascination with the idea of going there himself.
    “Say, you know. I done heard some things about up Norse,” Brownfield said, after he had eaten and come outdoors again. “They say it ain’t as good as folks make it out to be.”
    “Maybe not, maybe ’tis,” she said, stirring her pot, spitting snuff juice into the fire. “I wouldn’t be saying I knows. But I declare it so out of fashion round here you’d think most any other place would be better.”
    “Yessem,” he said, thinking what was so confounded bad about people not speaking to you if there was no Shipley around to see that you never made any money of your own. “Yessem.” He looked about the bleak yard and at the house that seemed about to cave in. “You just might have somethin’ there.”
    She continued to stir the pot, stoke up the fire and bustle about the yard.
    “They daddy work round here?” he asked, pointing to the three small children, who were busy rolling car tires.
    “Well, I tell you,” she said, standing up from putting more rubber around the pot and resting her back by swaying it, “one of they daddies is dead from being in the war, although he only got as far as Fort Bennet. The other one of they daddies is now married to the woman what lives in the next house down the road. If you stands up on your tippy toes you can jest about see her roof, sort of green colored. I thought she was helpin’ me get another husband and all the time she was lookin’ out for herself. But I am still her friend. The other one of they daddies was my last husband, by common law, but he dead too now, shot by the old man he was working for for taking the chitlins out of a hog they kill.” She looked at the children and frowned. “But they is so much alike, just to look at; they git along right well together.”
    “Reckon they going to grow up and go on up Norse too?” he asked, looking at the children. They had bad colds and snot ran down their lips like glue.
    “I don’t know,” she said, stirring her pot. “The Lawd knows I loves them, but when they does grow up I hope they has sense enough to git away from round here.”
    “Well, I thank you kindly for that good breakfast.”
    “Aw, don’t mention it. ’N if you gets hongry runnin’ back the other way drop in again.” She gave him a grave, boastful, wry and conspiratorial smile. “I also hope you finds your daddy.”
    “Bye, you all,” he said, waving to the children, who stopped playing to stare at him.
    “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” they piped like birds, running after him to the edge of the highway, and yelling “Bye-bye!” long after he had turned the curve and was out of sight. He heard their mother call “Y’all come