We Have Always Lived in the Castle Read Online Free PDF

I reached out and took hold of the spoon. Very likely he would, I told myself wisely, very likely he would throw the coffee in my face.
    â€œGoing somewheres else,” he said sadly.
    â€œCut it out,” Stella said.
    I would listen more carefully when Uncle Julian told his story. I was already bringing peanut brittle; that was good.
    â€œHere I was all upset,” Jim Donell said, “thinking the town would be losing one of its fine old families. That would be really too bad.” He swung the other way around on the stool because someone else was coming through the doorway; I was looking at my hands in my lap and of course would not turn around to see who was coming, but then Jim Donell said “Joe,” and I knew it was Dunham, the carpenter; “Joe, you ever hear anything like this? Here all over town they’re saying that the Blackwoods are moving away, and now Miss Mary Katherine Blackwood sits right here and speaks up and tells me they’re not.”
    There was a little silence. I knew that Dunham was scowling, looking at Jim Donell and at Stella and at me, thinking over what he had heard, sorting out the words and deciding what each one meant. “That so?” he said at last.
    â€œListen, you two,” Stella said, but Jim Donell went right on, talking with his back to me, and his legs stretched out so I could not get past him and outside. “I was saying to people only this morning it’s too bad when the old families go. Although you could rightly say a good number of the Blackwoods are gone already.” He laughed, and slapped the counter with his hand. “Gone already,” he said again. The spoon in his cup was still, but he was talking on. “A village loses a lot of style when the fine old people go. Anyone would think,” he said slowly, “that they wasn’t wanted.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Dunham said, and he laughed.
    â€œThe way they live up in their fine old private estate, with their fences and their private path and their stylish way of living.” He always went on until he was tired. When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry. Besides, each time he repeated himself he thought it was funnier; I knew he might go on like this until he was really sure that no one was listening any more, and I made a rule for myself: Never think anything more than once, and I put my hands quietly in my lap. I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.
    â€œWell,” Jim Donell said; he smelled, too. “I can always tell people I used to know the Blackwoods. They never did anything to me that I can remember, always perfectly polite to me. Not,” he said, and laughed, “that I ever got invited to take my dinner with them, nothing like that.”
    â€œThat’s enough right there,” Stella said, and her voice was sharp. “You go pick on someone else, Jim Donell.”
    â€œWas I picking on anyone? You think I wanted to be asked to dinner? You think I’m crazy? ”
    â€œMe,” Dunham said, “I can always tell people I fixed their broken step once and never got paid for it.” That was true. Constance had sent me out to tell him that we wouldn’t pay carpenter’s prices for a raw board nailed crookedly across the step when what he was supposed to do was build it trim and new. When I went out and told him we wouldn’t pay he grinned at me and spat, and picked up his hammer and pried the board loose and threw it on the ground. “Do it yourself,” he said to me, and got into his truck and drove away. “Never did get paid for it,” he said now.
    â€œThat must of been an oversight, Joe. You just go right up and speak to Miss Constance Blackwood and she’ll see you get what’s coming to you. Just if you get