Trouble in July Read Online Free PDF Page A

times he had been to Andrewjones, he had never in his life before been so far away from home. He had often wondered what was on the other side of Earnshaw Ridge, but for all he knew the world came to an end there and then.
    He was creeping anxiously through the stiff underbrush at the edge of the woods. When he reached the clearing of an open field, he stopped and listened for a while. A hound was barking somewhere down in the lowlands, but there was no other sound in the night. He stood up and, after looking around in all directions, walked cautiously across the field in the direction of the plantation. He did not know any other place to go.
    He moved across the field in spasms of haste, stopping abruptly when he thought he heard sounds, hurrying on again when the fear had passed. He knew unerringly the direction to take to the quarters where the Negro families lived on the plantation. He jumped a hedge and trotted joyfully in a furrow in a cultivated field. Each step that carried him closer home made him feel happier than he had ever felt before.
    Sonny was eighteen years old and he lived with his grandmother, Mammy Taliaferro, in the Negro quarters on Bob Watson’s plantation. He worked as a field-hand, and he earned enough money to support his grandmother and himself. Both of his parents had been killed about ten years before when a logging truck, running wild down Earnshaw Ridge, struck the wagon in which they were riding.
    The cabins in the quarters rose up suddenly in front of him. The starlight made the fields, and even the buildings themselves, look as familiar in the night as they were during the day. He crouched in a ditch behind the first cabin for ten or fifteen minutes, because he wanted to feel sure it was safe for him to come out in the open so near the buildings.
    He could not see anyone moving around the cabins, and there was not a light in any of them. It made him feel as lonely and afraid as he had been in the woods.
    After a while he crept on his hands and knees to the back of the nearest cabin. Raising himself from his knees, he peered through a chink in the door.
    By the rosy wavering flame of fat pine chunks he could see Henry Bagley and his wife, Vi, crouched over the hearth in the big room. Henry had always been Sonny’s friend, and he had been thinking of Henry during the whole time he was hiding in the woods on Earnshaw Ridge. He was afraid to go to his own home. He knew he would have a hard time trying to explain to Mammy what had happened and, besides he was afraid some white men might be waiting there to grab him the instant he showed his face.
    Sonny waited breathlessly, his eyes fixed on the faint light from the hearth. It was several minutes before he could find enough courage to call Henry. Then he put his lips to the crack and breathed Henry’s name.
    Henry sat perfectly still. Only his eyes moved door-ward.
    “Who there?” he called in a low voice, startled and afraid.
    Vi reached forward with as little movement as possible and threw another pine chunk on the fire. The room brightened.
    “It’s me, Henry,” Sonny whispered. “It’s Sonny.”
    “What you mean by whispering, me out of my wits like that, boy?” he said. “Ain’t you got no sense at all?”
    “I didn’t aim to scare you, Henry,” he said.
    Henry and Vi glanced at each other, each one nodding. Vi turned to see if the front door had the lock turned, and Henry got up and went cautiously to the back door. He put his ear against the door and listened to hear if he could detect sounds out there.
    “Come on out here, Henry.”
    “What you want?”
    “I got something to tell you.”
    Henry and Vi opened the door a few inches and looked out into the yard. Both of them saw him crouching on the ground in the corner between the doorstep and the side of the house.
    Henry opened the door a little more and stepped down beside Sonny.
    “What’s the matter with you, boy?” he asked.
    “I’ve gone and got myself into