This Tender Land Read Online Free PDF

turned down in a worried frown. From the sad waves they gave us as we drove off, you’d have thought we were heading to our own execution. Which wasn’t far from the truth.
    For a long time, no one said a word. Mr. Brickman kept his foot heavy on the accelerator so that we raised a cloud of dust behind us. Albert and Mose and I were furiously signing to one another.
    Mose: We’re dead .
    Albert: I can fix this.
    Me: The Black Witch will eat us for dinner.
    “Enough back there,” Mrs. Brickman ordered, and I thought she must have had eyes in the back of her head.
    When we arrived at the school, Mr. Brickman pulled the car into the drive of the superintendent’s home, which was located a short walk from the administration building. It was a lovely two-story brick house, with a lawn and flower beds kept beautiful by the hardwork of kids from the school. We all got out, and Mrs. Brickman said pleasantly, “Just in time for supper.”
    Meals were rigidly scheduled: breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, dinner at five. If you missed the beginning of a meal, you missed the meal altogether, because no kid was allowed in once everyone else had been seated. I was hungry. We’d worked hard that day, though not as hard as we would have if we’d been in Bledsoe’s hayfields. I was buoyed by the Black Witch’s comment. Despite what she’d said to Cora Frost, I’d figured we had as much chance of eating that night as Custer had of walloping the Sioux at the Little Bighorn.
    Turned out, I was right.
    “Clyde, I think we need an object lesson here. I think these boys will go without dinner tonight.”
    Albert said, “It was my fault, Mrs. Brickman. I should have double-checked with you before we left.”
    “Yes, you should have.” She smiled on him. “But because you realize that, I think you will not miss your supper.”
    Albert glanced at me but said nothing. In that moment I hated him, hated every little toady thing about him. Fine, I thought. I hope you choke on your food.
    “Boys,” Mrs. Brickman said, “is there anything you would like to say?”
    Mose nodded and signed, You’re a turd.
    “What did he say?” the Black Witch asked Albert.
    “That he’s very sorry. But Mrs. Frost told him to leave the hayfield with her, and it would have been impolite to say no to a teacher.”
    “He signed all that?” she said.
    “More or less,” Albert said.
    “And you?” she said to me. “Is there nothing you have to say?”
    I signed, I pee in your flower beds when you’re not looking.
    She said, “I don’t know what you signed, but I’m sure I wouldn’t like it. Clyde, I think our little Odie will not only miss supper. He will also spend tonight in the quiet room. And Moses will keep him company.”
    I hoped maybe Albert would jump to our defense, but he only stood there.
    I signed to him, Just wait. When you’re asleep, I’ll pee on your face.
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    THEY’D TAKEN AWAY my supper, but they’d left me my harmonica. As the sun went down that evening and all the other kids were gathered in the auditorium for movie night, I played my favorite tunes and Mose’s in the quiet room. He knew the words to the songs and signed along with the music.
    Mose wasn’t mute. When he was four years old, his tongue had been cut off. No one knew who’d done it. He’d been found beaten, unconscious, and tongueless, in some reeds in a roadside ditch along with his shot-dead mother, not far outside Granite Falls. He had no way of communicating, of saying who might have done these terrible things. He’d always claimed to have no memory of it. Even if he’d been able to speak, he had no idea about his family. He didn’t have a father he knew of, and he’d always called his mother simply Mama, so no idea what her real name was. The authorities insisted that they’d done their best, which because he was an Indian kid, simply meant they’d made a few inquiries of the local Sioux, but no one claimed to know the dead woman or the