Yonder Stands Your Orphan Read Online Free PDF

as if there was no more discussion, Percy took the money, and Ulrich struggled from the rear seat offering his hand but looking at the pavement. Percy agreed. He did not even ask about the deer, had forgotten it.
    â€œThank you ever so much,” Melanie said as the body man handed over the keys to Ulrich. “You are very human and forgiving.” She smiled at Marcine. “And lovely.” Marcine had tamer, modest hair now, and wore only lipstick, mid-heeled white shoes.
    They drove away in the two cars, and Marcine watched, a startled worship still on her face.
    Next afternoon, she pouted, then went to the home of Ronny the body man’s aunt, who worked for this man in Vicksburg at a kind of car agency. The aunt dressed well and seemed to have no worries, had a thirty-five-inch Sanyo television with Direct Digital TV system and a brick house.
    â€œWhat is the name of the man you work for in Vicksburg, Bertha?”
    â€œThe man is
Man
.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHis name is Man Mortimer. Hard, but a teddy bear. If you know him.”
    â€œYou look to be doing fine.”
    â€œOh, they is opportunities up there. If you get in, all you have to do is one main deal.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”

    â€œForget everything. You going to rise, you gonna love forgetting you ever had a memory. I recommend it. You know there’s no world with that pissant nephew of mine. You’ll remember every day till when you cut your own heart out with a knife.”
    â€œI heard that.”
    When her husband Wootie died, Melanie stayed on the lake in their rambling vacation house. She was seventy-one years old and wished she were a poet. But she was too direct for that, her senses too good, her memory too precise, and she couldn’t drink much.
    She loved the egrets, the cranes, the herons, and in the evening the bullfrogs singing around the cove in their squat ardor. She was a pretty old woman, and her husband, a college president, had been very grateful. Theirs was a kind marriage without much fever, and in his sixties Wootie began falling in love with boy students and writing them letters. He was fired. This did not confuse Melanie’s esteem for him. She stuck with him until he died in this house on the lake where he had fled in terminal depression. They had friends among the old men who spent their days on the pier.
    She was an artisan who blew glass animals in a rear part of the house and sold them at the bait house in the crossroads of the lake and Vicksburg highways. She had living money and did not need to do this, but she had never honestly known the world of men and intended to have contact with it. The women she had known were trivial and glum academic wives. Without hate she withdrew from them. She also cheered the old at the Onward nursing home and gave away her animals there. She organized speakers and entertainments for them. She would sometimes visit the casino in Vicksburg all alone, not to gamble but because she relishedthe musicians. Men thought she was in her late forties, most likely, and some wondered if her elegance indicated a high-class prostitute of some sort. But she had a poise about her that kept them polite and even a little scared, because they assumed she must be connected to a powerful man not of these parts.
    She watched from her windows. She watched for men like a teenager. She watched for wildlife like a child. One day she saw an eagle fishing. Another day she saw an armadillo mother playing with her children.
    She liked a big-stomached black fellow who sat on a white lard bucket fishing a lesser inlet of the big cove with a cane pole. He was quiet until a fish was on, and then she would hear him talking to it. Sometimes he whooped as if rolling down the aisle in a church. He was engaged. Otherwise he ate his boiled meat, rat cheese and saltines with a cold tall can of beer from the ice of his other lard bucket, then slept whole half hours on top of the lard