What the Dead Men Say Read Online Free PDF Page A

mama’s boy. They could settle that particular matter later.
        He lay on the bed. Another black fly started walking around on his red freckles.
        What the hell would a lawman want with Uncle Septemus, anyway?
        

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        “You telling me you don’t believe in a divine being?”
        “No. I’m just telling you that I’m tired of a prayer that goes on for five minutes.”
        “It’s not just another prayer, Dennis. It’s grace. It’s thanking the Lord for all his wonderful gifts.”
        “And just what gifts would those be?” Dennis Kittredge asked his wife.
        They were at the dining room table, the festive one with the red and white oilcloth spread over it, a small blue blown-glass butter dish the shape of a diamond, and a pair of salt and pepper shakers got up to look like stalks of sweet corn.
        His wife Mae was a small and fine-boned woman who was given to excessively high collars and excessively long skirts and excessively stern looks. In her youth she’d been high fine company, a tireless attender of county fairs and ice cream socials, and a somewhat daring lover. While they had never committed the ultimate sin in the time before their vows, they had many nights come very, very close: especially downriver near the dam where fireflies glowed like jewels against the ebony sky, and there was music to be heard in the silver water splashing down on the sharp rocks below.
        Then two years after their marriage Mae had become pregnant, but she’d lost the child in a bloody puddle in the middle of the night, on a white sleeping sheet she’d later burned.
        Ever since then she’d been lost to God. Her juices had seemed to dry up till she was an old and indifferent woman about sex, and even worse about festivities. Nights, after Kittredge was home from the farms where he worked for twenty-three cents an hour, she played the saw as her mother had taught her, and in the soft fitful glow of the kerosene lamp read him the Bible, the only part of which he cared anything for being the Book of Job. Oh, yes; Job was a man Kittredge could believe, all pain and rage and dashed expectations. The rest of the biblical prophets struck him as stupid and they bored him silly. But Job…
        “You ready now?” she said, as if he were a little boy she had only to wait out.
        He sighed, a scarecrow of a man with a long, angular face and furious black brows and dead cornflower blue eyes. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
        “Then proceed.”
        Why the hell did he stay here anymore? It was like living with your maiden aunt. But where else could he go?
        He said grace and he said it the way he knew she wanted him to. No mumbling, no sloppy posture. He sat up bolt straight and he spoke in clear, loud words, with his head bowed: “Bless us O Lord for these our gifts…”
        There was one sure way to irritate her; to keep your head up or spend your time eating up the food with your eyes.
        “God likes it better when you bow your head,” she’d told him once. So that was that. Ever since then he’d bowed his head. It just wasn’t worth the grief he’d have gotten otherwise.
        “You say it nice,” she said when he’d finished and was already helping himself to the boiled potatoes and tomatoes and chicken. “You’ve got such a strong, manly voice and the Lord appreciates that.”
        He glanced up at her for a dangerous moment. He almost asked: And just how do you know all these things the Lord wants so much? Does he come and visit you at night after I’m asleep? Or maybe he comes during the day while I’m working; comes in and helps himself to the teakettle and sits in the wooden rocker next to the window and tells you exactly what he wants me and you to do. It must be something like that, Mae, because there’s no other way you could possibly know so much about his likes and dislikes. No other