We Are What We Pretend to Be Read Online Free PDF Page B

until 11, was defending her relationship with Roy Flemming, her beau of the night before. She seemed agitated, punctuating her replies to the General’s poignant assaults on Roy’s character with nose blowing. She declared that she loved Roy, and that this was one romance her father was not going to break up. There seemed to have been plenty of cases where the General had succeeded in doing just that.
    “Until you’re twenty-one, young lady, let me be the judge of who your associates should be,” Haley heard the General say. “After that, you’re free to marry anybody, simply anybody—Flemming, Mr. Banghart, or the next bum who stops for a handout. Until that happy day, however, I am very much in charge. Do we understand each other?” Kitty hastened past Haley’s aching form and hurried up the stairs to slam her bedroom door on a loveless world for lovers.
    “H-hour!” shouted the General, and he harangued his flagging troops into the field once more.

    In an eon came evening, to cool and to displace the sounds of daytime with whispers and croaks and sounds like rusty hinges from grass-tuft sanctuaries in woods and pastures and from lily pads a quarter of a mile away.
    Annie had prepared supper an hour ago, and, from the small window at the end of a long corridor between bales in the loft, Haley could see her putting it into the oven to keep it warm. He, Hope, and Mr. Banghart, meeting a quota set by the General, were stacking the last wagonload in the barn. The General had returned to the house, leaving the three of them to handle what remained without his supervision. It was much cooler now, and, with him gone, an element of playfulness came into the business of lugging bales. Haley found his burdens miraculously lightened. Mr. Banghart sang a medley of rhythmic spirituals, setting a tempo by which they tugged and lifted. The work was done.
    They sat down in the corridor between bales to get their breaths and to shake the dust and straw-bits from their hair. As bad as his first taste of rural life had been, Haley found himself looking with pride at the results of their labor, stacked bales rising like skyscrapers on either side of them. Mr. Banghart sat still for only a minute, arising again to feel along the upper surface of a rafter until he found what he wanted, a flashlight. “We can show Haley our secret, can’t we, Hope?” he asked.
    “I suppose so. It’s really kind of silly, though.”
    “I’d like very much to see it. I wouldn’t tell anybody,” Haley promised.
    They led him down the corridor to within a few feet of the window at its end. The bales had been stacked here before
Haley’s arrival at Ardennes Farm. Mr. Banghart pointed his flashlight at a bale in the bottom row. “Notice anything different about that one?” he asked.
    “Well, there’s a piece of cloth tied around the baling wire,” said Haley.
    “That’s a marker,” said Mr. Banghart. “Try and move that one.”
    Haley tugged at the bale dutifully. He was surprised to find that it slid from its place easily, that the bales above did not rest upon it.
    “It’s a tunnel!” Mr. Banghart announced happily. He dropped onto all fours and crawled into the opening and out of sight.
    “Go on in, Haley,” said Hope. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
    Haley followed Mr. Banghart into the dark passage, finding that there was barely room in which to squirm. After snaking his way through nine feet of the snug, airless tunnel, with claustrophobia beginning to give him twinges of panic, he found himself in a chamber in which he could stand, lighted by Mr. Banghart’s flashlight. It was a room hollowed in the stacked bales, as long and wide as the sunroom couch, with a ceiling, resting on planks, that barely brushed the top of his head.
    Hope emerged from the passage as he stood blinking in disbelief. “This is one place where the General and Annie can never find you,” she said. “And there’ll be times when you’ll be