They Don't Dance Much: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

and that amounted to around half a million dollars. He could have lived like a king off the interest on that, but he took a job in his daddy’s hosiery mill. They said the old man wanted him to keep on in the business. He worked all over the mill, at different jobs. When he married Lola Shaw he was about thirty-five years old. He was in charge of the Sales Department by then. He went to Northern towns like New York and Philadelphia and sold the hosiery they manufactured. That kept him out of Corinth a good part of the time.
    He had a good education. He finished at Duke University and then had a year at Harvard. I don’t know how come him to go to Harvard. After he left there he came back to Corinth and commenced working in the hosiery mill. He was a quiet fellow and played a lot of bridge with the best folks in Corinth. Sometimes he would hang around Baucom’s Pharmacy, or around the Élite Pool Room and try to be one of the boys. But he couldn’t quite make it.
    Off at a distance he didn’t look like much, but if you got up right close and looked at him there wasn’t anything really wrong with his looks. His hair was light and his skin was pink, like a tomato that will be ripe in a couple of days. He wore octagon-shaped glasses and he blinked his eyes a lot. I guess they were weak. But he could see good enough to notice that Lola Shaw was stacked up like a brick hotel. Then I reckon she gave him the works with those sleepy eyes of hers and it was a little more than he could stand. I doubt if he’d ever fooled with women much.
    I heard in Corinth that Smut thought she was just playing around with Fisher to please her mother. But he was a fool if he thought that. She meant business. Her mother had run through with most of the money the old horse doctor left them, and I doubt if Lola liked the prospects of teaching school for her living. It took her just a little over a month to hook the richest young man in town. A horse doctor’s daughter that can do that is bound to have more on the ball than just a loose grip.
    Old Henry Fisher wasn’t crazy about Charles marrying her. Still I don’t think he said much against it.
    They had a simple and quiet wedding. Anyway that’s what Fletch Monroe said in the Enterprise a couple of months after the honeymoon was over. Charles built a new house on Pee Dee Avenue, at the other end of the street from where his daddy’s house was. Lola blossomed out in a new sports roadster. Nile green, I think they said, was the name of the color.
    If Smut Milligan was cut up about the way things turned out, he never let on. He didn’t even pitch a drunk when they went to New York and Canada on their honeymoon. That was always Smut: stand up and take it.

3
    IT WAS ON A WEDNESDAY night that Smut Milligan offered me a job working at his place. The rest of that week I was busy settling up my own affairs. I wrote the Land Bank at Columbia, South Carolina, and told them that I was giving up the farm. Then I went to Corinth and told Jasper Yonce to send a man out to get the cow. I talked to the sheriff and he agreed to take the mule and what farming tools I had for the back taxes and the interest. He had a farm and could use the stuff. Saturday afternoon I sold my hens to Wash Davis, a nigger hen-trader that drove all around the country in a top buggy, buying hens, eggs, dogs, possums, rabbits, and mighty near anything else you wanted to sell cheap, or swap.
    I left a sort of crop there, but it couldn’t be helped. The cotton didn’t look like it would be worth picking. I figured I could sell the corn in the field to some farmer and let him gather it.
    Sunday I got Smut Milligan’s pick-up and hauled what furniture I had, and my trunk, to his place. I stored the furniture in his car shed till I could find a sale for it.
    I left a few things at the house. They were mostly things that I couldn’t use away from there, and things that I knew I couldn’t sell. I left a spinning-wheel that was