The Tin Can Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

running through the flour on his cheeks and his eyes were frowning and angry. “Well—” he said, and his voice came out croaky. He took a breath and cleared his throat. “Well, I reckon I’ll be getting on home,” he said.
    “Oh, now,” said Ansel.
    But James said, “All right. It’s all right.”
    He crossed over to open the door and Simon went out, stumbling a little. James followed him. He stood on the porch and watched Simon all the way down tohis end of the house, hoping Simon might look back once, but he never did. He walked stiffly and blindly, with his sharp little shoulder-bones sticking out through the back of his jacket. When he reached his own door he hesitated, with his hand on the knob and his back still toward James. Then he said, “Well,” again, and pulled the door open and went on in. The screen door slammed shut and rattled once and was still. James could hear Simon’s footsteps clomping on across the hollow floor of the parlor.
    The aluminum porch chair was still beneath the window, where Ansel had been sitting in it to watch the funeral go by. After a minute James went over and sat down on it. He let his arms rest along the arms of the chair and the metal burned him, making two lines of sunbaked heat down the inside of his forearms. Behind him was the soft sound of the mesh curtains moving, and the sleeves of Ansel’s rough black suit sliding across the splintery windowsill. “Hot out,” Ansel said.
    James squinted toward the road.
    “I wish it was the season for tangerines.”
    There were no people passing now, only the yellow fields across the way rippling in the wind and one gray hound plodding slowly through the yard. In the house behind James were the soft, humming sounds of other people, murmuring indistinct words to one another and moving gently around. James closed his eyes.
    “Hey, James.”
    He didn’t answer.
    “
James.
”
    “What.”
    “James, I told you he wouldn’t eat.”
    The wind began again, and James rose from his chairto go inside. He didn’t want to sit here any more. Here it was too still; here there was only that wind, rushing over and around the house in its solitary position among the weeds.

2
    J oan Pike was twenty-six years old, and had lived in bedrooms all her life. She lived the way a guest would—keeping her property strictly within the walls of her room, hanging her towel and washcloth on a bar behind her door. No one asked her to. Her aunt had even said to her, once, that she wished Joan would act more at home here. “You could at
least
hang your coat in the downstairs closet,” she said. “Could you do that much?” And Joan had nodded, and from then on hung her coat with the others. But her towel stayed in her own room, because nobody had mentioned that to her. And she read and sewed sitting on her bed, unless she was expressly invited downstairs.
    If they had asked her, point-blank, the way they must have wanted to—if they had asked, “Why do you have to be invited?” she wouldn’t have known the answer. It was what she was used to; that was all. When she was born, her parents were already middle-aged. They weren’t sure what they were supposed to do with her; they treated her politely, like a visitor who had dropped in unexpectedly. If she sat with them after supper they tried to make some sort of conversation, or gazed at her uneasily over the tops of their magazines until she retreated to her room. So now, a hundred miles fromhome and on her own, it felt only natural to be living in another bedroom, although she hadn’t planned it that way. She had come here planning just to stay with the Pikes a week or two, until she found a place of her own, and then the children made her change her mind. When Janie Rose’s hamster ran away, and Janie Rose stayed an hour in the bathroom shouting that it wasn’t important, brushing her teeth over and over with scalding hot water that she didn’t even notice and crying into the sink, Joan was