When She Was Good Read Online Free PDF

isn’t when that barbarian goes on the warpath? In the olden days a man like that, they would put him on a rail and run him out of town.”
    “Well, maybe this ain’t the olden days any more,” he said.
    “Well, more’s the pity!”
    Lastly Myra. His Myra.
    “Myra, I am sitting here debating what to do. And I am really of two minds, I’ll tell you that. What has happened here, I never thought I would ever live to see. I have spoken to Lucy. I have gotten her to promise that nothing like this is ever going to happen again.”
    “She promised?”
    “More or less, I would say, yes. And I have just finished talking with your mother. She is at the end of her tether, Myra. I can’t say that I blame her. But I believe I have made her see the light. Because her feeling, to put it blunt, is to let him sit in that jail and rot.”
    Myra closed her eyes, so deep, so deep in purple rings from all her secret weeping.
    “But I have calmed her down,” he said.
    “Yes?”
    “More or less, I think so. She is going to accept my judgment of the thing. Myra,” he said, “it has been a long twelve-year haul. For everybody living here it has been a long struggle.”
    “Daddy, we’re going to move, so it’s over. The struggle is over.”
    “
What?
”
    “We’re going to Florida.”
    “Florida!”
    “Where Duane can start fresh—”
    “Myra, there ain’t a morning of his life he can’t start fresh, and right here.”
    “But here someone else’s roof, Daddy, is over his head.”
    “And how come? Well, what’s the answer, Myra? Where is it he is going to get the stick-to-it-iveness in Florida that he is not able to have up here? I’d like to know.”
    “He has relatives in Florida.”
    “You mean now he’s going to go down and live off them?”
    “Not live
off
them—”
    “And suppose last night had happened in Florida. Or Oklahoma. Or wherever!”
    “But it wouldn’t!”
    “And why not? The nice climate? The beautiful color of the sky?”
    “Because he could be on his own. That’s all he wants.”
    “Honey, it’s all I want too. It’s what we all want. But where is the evidence, Myra, that on his own, with a daughter, with a wife, with all the thousand responsibilities—”
    “But he’s such a good man.” Here she began to sob. “I wake up in the night—oh, Daddy, I wake up, and ‘Myra,’ he says to me, ‘you are the best thing I have, Myra—Myra, don’t hate me.’ Oh, if only we could go—”
    In the middle of her very first semester, when Lucy came home at Thanksgiving time to say that she was getting married, Whitey sat himself down on the edge of the sofa in the parlor and just caved in. “But I wanted her to be a college graduate,” he said, lowering his head into his hands, and the sounds that emerged from his mouth might have softened in you everything that had hardened against him, if you didn’t have to wonder if that wasn’t why he was making the sounds in the first place. For the first hour he wept steadily like a woman, then gaspingly like a child for another, until even though he wanted you to forgive him, you almost had to anyway,watching him have to perform that way within plain view of his own family.
    And then the miracle happened. At first he looked to be sick, or maybe even about to do something to himself. It was actually frightening to see. For days on end he hardly ate, though he was there at every dinner hour; in the evening he would sit out on the front porch, refusing to speak or to come in out of the cold. Once in the middle of the night Willard heard moving in the house and came into the kitchen in his robe to see Whitey looming over a cup of coffee. “What’s the trouble, Whitey, can’t you sleep?” “… don’t want to sleep.” “What is it, Whitey? Why are you all dressed?” Here Whitey turned to the wall, so that all Willard could see, as his son-in-law’s whole big body began to tremble, was the back of his broad shoulders and his wide powerful