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The mud on Main Street was half a foot deep and mixed with enough horse shit to make him wish he had something to clamp over his nose. But he’d lost his handkerchief on the train coming up, and anyway, it was stained with blood: in New Orleans a fellow had punched him in the mouth. He couldn’t remember who it was, though he did recall how much it hurt.
A supply wagon loaded with hundred-pound sacks of feed grain and hog shorts waited in front of Rosenthal’s General Merchandise, and a couple horses were tied up in front of the hardware. But he knew, because he knew his brother, that Leighton would already be in—he’d probably been at the office since five or five-thirty. He went to bed every night at nine o’clock and rose at four so he could get an hour’s worth of reading done before setting to work. He’d always done that and always would, especially now that he had two jobs instead of one.
The legend on the window said loring weekly times. The building had once been a saloon, but that closed down back in ’96
when the drys won the local option election. Leighton had played a role in their favor, editorializing at length, arguing that the whole community should be outraged at the sight of drunks staggering along the sidewalk, bumping into women.
Through the window this morning, Tandy could see him sitting at his rolltop desk, back where the poker tables used to be, reading a big leather-bound volume. He wore a gray suit, and Tandy knew the suit was clean and fresh-smelling, that the collar of his white shirt had been pressed this very morning. He knew who had pressed it, too.
The door was unlocked; he opened it and stepped inside. Blank sheets of newspaper were stacked on the floor near an old copper-plated handpress, and on the counter were metal baskets with copy in them. A Western Newspaper Union calendar hung on one wall. Instead of smelling like cigarettes and whiskey, as it used to, the place stank now of ink and dust.
Leighton didn’t even look up. “I was wondering when I’d hear from you,” he said.
Tandy stomped each boot on the floor, and clots of mud flew off.
Leighton laid the book down. He stared at Tandy’s boots. “Most folks would’ve stomped the mud off outside.”
“Course, I’m not most folks. I’m family.”
Leighton stood. As always, when Tandy had been away for a while, the size of his brother took him by surprise. Tandy was not a small man himself, but Leighton stood six foot five, an inch taller than their father, and even though he lacked their father’s weight, he could still fill a room by himself. When Leighton was present, Tandy felt he had less of everything—less space to move around in, less air to breathe.
A big lightbulb hung from the ceiling. Pointing, Tandy said, “I heard y’all had got electric power.”
The civic booster in his brother asserted itself: you could almost see his chest swell. “Got it last fall. Right now, it’s only on from six till midnight, but that’s a big help to us on Wednesday evening, when we’re actually printing the paper.” He smiled and crossed his arms. “You hear what happened over at the livery stables?”
“No.”
“Uncle Billy Heath decided he needed him some electric power. Said he wanted to be able to check on his horses without worrying about toting a coal-oil lamp in there and having one of ’em kick it over and set the whole place afire. So he had Loring Light, Ice and Coal string a cable in and suspend a big old bulb from the rafters. When they turned on the power, all the horses went crazy. They kicked open the stall doors and took off down Main Street. One of ’em ran right over Uncle Billy. Broke his arm in two places.”
Tandy laughed. Eight or ten years ago, in a poker game in this very building, Uncle Billy Heath had beaten him out of a good-looking saddlebred mare. Tandy had owned the mare for only three or four hours before losing her, and it pleased him now to think maybe she was the one who’d broken Uncle Billy’s arm.
“When a person leaves town,” he said, “all sorts of things start happening. You don’t hardly know the place when you get back.”
“Yeah, there’s a few things that have changed, I guess.” Leighton stuck his hands in his pockets. “I imagine you know A. L. Gunnels passed on.”
“No, I hadn’t heard that. Who’s the new mayor?”
“The truth is, you’re looking at him.”
This was the moment Tandy had dreaded, the worst thing about coming back. At two o’clock this morning, as he sat on a hard bench at the depot, batting away mosquitoes and doing his best to stay awake, he had imagined what it was going to feel like when he stood face-to-face with his brother and acknowledged another of Leighton’s successes, and it had almost been enough to make him jump on the next train leaving town. The problem was, he didn’t have the money to buy a ticket on the next train. He’d traveled just as far as he could.
“Well now, damn if we don’t have a politician in the family,” he said. “Congratulations.”
He offered Leighton his hand. When his brother took it, Tandy felt how puny his own fingers were. The handshake almost crushed them.
“All I plan to do’s serve out the rest of A.L.’s term. Some folks got together and asked me to do it, and I felt like I couldn’t say no. I don’t know if congratulations are in order, though. Maybe condolences would be more appropriate.”
“How come?”
“We’ve got some troublesome issues to confront. For instance, there’s a group of folks who want to pass an ordinance making it illegal to construct any more frame buildings, because they’re scared a fire’ll sweep through and burn the whole town down. But brick’s expensive, so some folks are claiming this ordinance’ll discourage new businesses and retard progress—retard progress is a phrase you hear in the board meetings every two or three minutes. People get all heated up over stuff like that, and by virtue of being both mayor and editor of the local paper, I’m smack-dab in the middle.”
If being smack-dab in the middle displeased him, Tandy couldn’t tell it. Leighton seemed, as always, quite happy with himself.
He did not, however, look particularly happy with Tandy. He let his eyes travel down his brother’s torso to his pants, which a year ago had been white but were now a dingy cream color, with spots of mud and dried blood on the knees. The boots had last been shined five or six months back and were in need of repair.
“What happened?” he said. “Somebody catch you dealing from the bottom of the deck?”
“Nobody does that anymore.”
“Well, it looks like somebody caught you doing something.”
Nobody had caught him doing anything. A little more than a week ago, he’d been in a game where the pot had reached six thousand dollars, and a fellow he’d never seen before, a wiry little man with a funny accent and a gold watch chain that had a miniature jockey’s cap and a saddle hanging from it, had convinced him and the other three players to follow him over to the bank, where he’d request a loan based on his hand. Tandy had bought the key to the deck, he held a strong hand, and it never crossed his mind, not for one minute, that one of the other players might have bought the key, too. He believed he’d found the perfect sucker. He believed it right up until the man with the watch chain—having received his loan from a banker who Tandy figured must not know the first thing about poker—played a king and four aces.
The money hadn’t been Tandy’s to lose. People wanted that money, believing it was theirs, and if you looked at things in a certain way, they were right. He’d heard that if he didn’t leave town, somebody might kill him.
“You’re broke, aren’t you?” Leighton said.
“Temporarily insolvent’s how I’d put it.”
“Temporary’s got its limits. After a while, temporary becomes permanent.”
“There was a three-day period six months ago when I could have bought you and everything you call yours.”
“No,” Leighton said, “you couldn’t have.”
For a moment, while Leighton stood there facing him, letting his words sink in, Tandy hated his brother. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. But he knew that if he could just keep a grip on himself for a few more seconds, the moment of hating would pass and he’d be left with the same old bunch of feelings, which were far too complicated to bear a single name.
Leighton turned, walked back over to his desk. He flipped open a ledger that lay near his typewriter. He made a show of staring at it, running his finger down the page as if he were checking figures. “Where are you staying?”
“Thought I’d take a room at Miss Rosa’s.”
“Room and board at Miss Rosa’s is about four dollars a week. I imagine you’re a few dollars short?”
Tandy was tired: he hadn’t slept for two days or had a drink for three, and all he really wanted was to get into a nice soft bed with a bottle of whiskey and drink till he passed out cold. But one thing you could always do when you couldn’t do anything better was bluff. If nothing else, it kept you in the game. So he did his best to sound rakish, untroubled.
“Briefly.”
Leighton opened a desk drawer and took out a metal box. He raised the lid, pulled a few bills out, counted and laid them on the desk, then put the box back in the drawer. The entire operation probably took only a minute or so, but to Tandy it felt like ten years.
Leighton picked up the stack of bills and walked over and handed them to him.
“Thanks,” Tandy said.
“Sarah and Will’ll want to see you. Why don’t you come over tonight and eat supper?”
“All right.” He crammed the bills into his pocket. “Leighton . . . that board you mentioned? Has it got the power to give out jobs?”
“Jobs?” Leighton said, sounding as if he couldn’t believe he’d heard right.
“You know. City jobs.”
“Yeah,” Leighton said. “It’s got the power to hire folks to sweep up the marshal’s office and cart garbage over to the town dump. You want to cart garbage, Tandy? Is that what you’re saying?”
Beneath Tandy’s feet, the floorboards creaked. He was sweating now. He smelled his own odor.
Through the inverted letters on the front window, Leighton watched his brother shamble across the intersection at Main and First, his head down, his eyes on the ground. He looked whipped, the very picture of failure and dejection, until he heard the sound of a horse’s hooves and looked up. Sally Stark, the wife of a local planter, was driving along in a carriage. Instantly, Tandy’s bearing changed. Straightening himself up to his full height, he doffed his fedora and swept it through the air, then executed a graceful bow.
Sally Stark pulled back on the reins, and the horse slowed down. Leighton watched while her face broke into a smile. Her lips formed a single word.
Tandy!
The house stood on the banks of Loring Bayou.A big white house surrounded by a white picket fence, it had a broad veranda overhung by cedars, pecan trees and locusts. Leighton had designed it himself, in concert with his father-in-law, and it had cost him $2,500. Tonight, it was brightly lit.
Walking up from the street, he heard music: Sarah playing the piano, Tandy singing “Danny Boy.” For a moment, he stopped and listened. He’d always loved hearing Tandy sing, but if he was in the room while the singing was going on, Leighton had to shut his eyes to enjoy it. Seeing the man behind the voice ruined the effect.
They had just finished the final chorus when he opened the door. Tandy was clean now, his pants and jacket sparkling white, his boots shining in the lamplight, though they still looked a little worn around the toes. He’d shaved and waxed his mustache and combed his hair.
He stood beside the piano. Sarah’s cheeks were rosy, and she was smiling up at him. Upstairs, in a walnut cabinet near the bed, there was a photograph of her sitting beside Tandy in a buggy. In the picture, she wore a lace dress and a tall hat with taffeta trim, and she was looking at him with that same bright smile on display.
Tandy was at home among women, always able to make them smile, whereas Leighton never quite felt comfortable in their presence. He liked them and wanted to be around them, but whenever they were near, he became aware of his size. He tended to bend toward them, ducking his head in compensation. More often than not, they instinctively pulled away.
“That sounded pretty darn good,” he said. He removed his hat, hung it on the rack and walked over and laid his hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “Maybe y’all could go on the road and make some money.”
“Tandy can’t make money. It’s beneath him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s beneath me. I’d say it’s somewhere off to the side.”
“It seems there are some people in New Orleans to whom Tandy owes more than six thousand dollars.”
“Give or take a dollar or two.”
“And they’ve suggested he might come to harm.”
“They’re not bad folks. They’re just a little too quick to rile.”
“So Tandy is here, as it were, in hiding.”
She hadn’t looked at Leighton since he’d walked in. He willed himself now to lift his hand from her shoulder, but he couldn’t. She was wearing a voile frock so sheer his fingertips could feel her pulse through the fabric. He felt the heat of her body as well, and something else—moisture, the sheen of perspiration on her skin. His free hand rose as if of its own volition; he almost laid it on her other shoulder and caressed her. What stopped him was the sight of a blackish smear on his palm. His hands had always looked rough, and now they frequently bore ink stains. He could never quite get them all off.
“Tandy can’t hide,” he said. “Tandy draws crowds like a dog draws fleas.”
They sat at the supper table, lingering over the remains of an apple pie Sarah had baked that afternoon. Tandy was telling a story about his adventures in New Orleans.
“So the driver, he looks over his shoulder at me and says, ‘The one on the left, sir, he rough-gaited, and the one on the right, well, she a shirker. This crushed gravel on the street, it get up in the frog on the horse’s foot, and it can make ’em go lame. Well, the one on the right there, she know I know that, so she start acting like that what’s done happened. But there’s one other thing she know I know. She know I know her just as well as she know me.’ And you know what the driver did then?”
“No,” Will said. “What’d he do, Uncle Tandy?”
“Well, he pulled the whip out of the socket and whacked the mare on her tail. But instead of picking up her pace, she got her tail up over the dashboard and cut loose with about five or six pounds of the stinky stuff.”
Will burst out laughing.
“Tandy!” Sarah said.
“The old nigger was naturally the color of blackstrap molasses, but when the horse did that, he gagged and turned green. He had to pull his hat off and hold it over his face all the way back to Jackson Square. Tell you the truth, it like to killed me, too.”
“Yeah,” Leighton said. “It just about killed me now to listen to it.”
He glanced at Will. He was nine, a tall skinny boy who sometimes got so excited he forgot to eat. He also forgot to sleep.
“It’s about time for you to go to bed, son.”
“Daddy!” Will balled his hands up into fists.
“William Lee Payne,” Sarah said. “Can you imagine your father or your uncle behaving like that if their father had told them to go to bed?”
Face sullen, Will kissed Sarah good night, then walked over and leaned against Leighton.
“Good night, son.”
“Night.”
On his way out, he paused long enough to shake hands with Tandy. “You’ll still be here tomorrow?”
“For tomorrow and for many days to co...
Présentation de l'éditeur :
A supply wagon loaded with hundred-pound sacks of feed grain and hog shorts waited in front of Rosenthal’s General Merchandise, and a couple horses were tied up in front of the hardware. But he knew, because he knew his brother, that Leighton would already be in—he’d probably been at the office since five or five-thirty. He went to bed every night at nine o’clock and rose at four so he could get an hour’s worth of reading done before setting to work. He’d always done that and always would, especially now that he had two jobs instead of one.
The legend on the window said loring weekly times. The building had once been a saloon, but that closed down back in ’96
when the drys won the local option election. Leighton had played a role in their favor, editorializing at length, arguing that the whole community should be outraged at the sight of drunks staggering along the sidewalk, bumping into women.
Through the window this morning, Tandy could see him sitting at his rolltop desk, back where the poker tables used to be, reading a big leather-bound volume. He wore a gray suit, and Tandy knew the suit was clean and fresh-smelling, that the collar of his white shirt had been pressed this very morning. He knew who had pressed it, too.
The door was unlocked; he opened it and stepped inside. Blank sheets of newspaper were stacked on the floor near an old copper-plated handpress, and on the counter were metal baskets with copy in them. A Western Newspaper Union calendar hung on one wall. Instead of smelling like cigarettes and whiskey, as it used to, the place stank now of ink and dust.
Leighton didn’t even look up. “I was wondering when I’d hear from you,” he said.
Tandy stomped each boot on the floor, and clots of mud flew off.
Leighton laid the book down. He stared at Tandy’s boots. “Most folks would’ve stomped the mud off outside.”
“Course, I’m not most folks. I’m family.”
Leighton stood. As always, when Tandy had been away for a while, the size of his brother took him by surprise. Tandy was not a small man himself, but Leighton stood six foot five, an inch taller than their father, and even though he lacked their father’s weight, he could still fill a room by himself. When Leighton was present, Tandy felt he had less of everything—less space to move around in, less air to breathe.
A big lightbulb hung from the ceiling. Pointing, Tandy said, “I heard y’all had got electric power.”
The civic booster in his brother asserted itself: you could almost see his chest swell. “Got it last fall. Right now, it’s only on from six till midnight, but that’s a big help to us on Wednesday evening, when we’re actually printing the paper.” He smiled and crossed his arms. “You hear what happened over at the livery stables?”
“No.”
“Uncle Billy Heath decided he needed him some electric power. Said he wanted to be able to check on his horses without worrying about toting a coal-oil lamp in there and having one of ’em kick it over and set the whole place afire. So he had Loring Light, Ice and Coal string a cable in and suspend a big old bulb from the rafters. When they turned on the power, all the horses went crazy. They kicked open the stall doors and took off down Main Street. One of ’em ran right over Uncle Billy. Broke his arm in two places.”
Tandy laughed. Eight or ten years ago, in a poker game in this very building, Uncle Billy Heath had beaten him out of a good-looking saddlebred mare. Tandy had owned the mare for only three or four hours before losing her, and it pleased him now to think maybe she was the one who’d broken Uncle Billy’s arm.
“When a person leaves town,” he said, “all sorts of things start happening. You don’t hardly know the place when you get back.”
“Yeah, there’s a few things that have changed, I guess.” Leighton stuck his hands in his pockets. “I imagine you know A. L. Gunnels passed on.”
“No, I hadn’t heard that. Who’s the new mayor?”
“The truth is, you’re looking at him.”
This was the moment Tandy had dreaded, the worst thing about coming back. At two o’clock this morning, as he sat on a hard bench at the depot, batting away mosquitoes and doing his best to stay awake, he had imagined what it was going to feel like when he stood face-to-face with his brother and acknowledged another of Leighton’s successes, and it had almost been enough to make him jump on the next train leaving town. The problem was, he didn’t have the money to buy a ticket on the next train. He’d traveled just as far as he could.
“Well now, damn if we don’t have a politician in the family,” he said. “Congratulations.”
He offered Leighton his hand. When his brother took it, Tandy felt how puny his own fingers were. The handshake almost crushed them.
“All I plan to do’s serve out the rest of A.L.’s term. Some folks got together and asked me to do it, and I felt like I couldn’t say no. I don’t know if congratulations are in order, though. Maybe condolences would be more appropriate.”
“How come?”
“We’ve got some troublesome issues to confront. For instance, there’s a group of folks who want to pass an ordinance making it illegal to construct any more frame buildings, because they’re scared a fire’ll sweep through and burn the whole town down. But brick’s expensive, so some folks are claiming this ordinance’ll discourage new businesses and retard progress—retard progress is a phrase you hear in the board meetings every two or three minutes. People get all heated up over stuff like that, and by virtue of being both mayor and editor of the local paper, I’m smack-dab in the middle.”
If being smack-dab in the middle displeased him, Tandy couldn’t tell it. Leighton seemed, as always, quite happy with himself.
He did not, however, look particularly happy with Tandy. He let his eyes travel down his brother’s torso to his pants, which a year ago had been white but were now a dingy cream color, with spots of mud and dried blood on the knees. The boots had last been shined five or six months back and were in need of repair.
“What happened?” he said. “Somebody catch you dealing from the bottom of the deck?”
“Nobody does that anymore.”
“Well, it looks like somebody caught you doing something.”
Nobody had caught him doing anything. A little more than a week ago, he’d been in a game where the pot had reached six thousand dollars, and a fellow he’d never seen before, a wiry little man with a funny accent and a gold watch chain that had a miniature jockey’s cap and a saddle hanging from it, had convinced him and the other three players to follow him over to the bank, where he’d request a loan based on his hand. Tandy had bought the key to the deck, he held a strong hand, and it never crossed his mind, not for one minute, that one of the other players might have bought the key, too. He believed he’d found the perfect sucker. He believed it right up until the man with the watch chain—having received his loan from a banker who Tandy figured must not know the first thing about poker—played a king and four aces.
The money hadn’t been Tandy’s to lose. People wanted that money, believing it was theirs, and if you looked at things in a certain way, they were right. He’d heard that if he didn’t leave town, somebody might kill him.
“You’re broke, aren’t you?” Leighton said.
“Temporarily insolvent’s how I’d put it.”
“Temporary’s got its limits. After a while, temporary becomes permanent.”
“There was a three-day period six months ago when I could have bought you and everything you call yours.”
“No,” Leighton said, “you couldn’t have.”
For a moment, while Leighton stood there facing him, letting his words sink in, Tandy hated his brother. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. But he knew that if he could just keep a grip on himself for a few more seconds, the moment of hating would pass and he’d be left with the same old bunch of feelings, which were far too complicated to bear a single name.
Leighton turned, walked back over to his desk. He flipped open a ledger that lay near his typewriter. He made a show of staring at it, running his finger down the page as if he were checking figures. “Where are you staying?”
“Thought I’d take a room at Miss Rosa’s.”
“Room and board at Miss Rosa’s is about four dollars a week. I imagine you’re a few dollars short?”
Tandy was tired: he hadn’t slept for two days or had a drink for three, and all he really wanted was to get into a nice soft bed with a bottle of whiskey and drink till he passed out cold. But one thing you could always do when you couldn’t do anything better was bluff. If nothing else, it kept you in the game. So he did his best to sound rakish, untroubled.
“Briefly.”
Leighton opened a desk drawer and took out a metal box. He raised the lid, pulled a few bills out, counted and laid them on the desk, then put the box back in the drawer. The entire operation probably took only a minute or so, but to Tandy it felt like ten years.
Leighton picked up the stack of bills and walked over and handed them to him.
“Thanks,” Tandy said.
“Sarah and Will’ll want to see you. Why don’t you come over tonight and eat supper?”
“All right.” He crammed the bills into his pocket. “Leighton . . . that board you mentioned? Has it got the power to give out jobs?”
“Jobs?” Leighton said, sounding as if he couldn’t believe he’d heard right.
“You know. City jobs.”
“Yeah,” Leighton said. “It’s got the power to hire folks to sweep up the marshal’s office and cart garbage over to the town dump. You want to cart garbage, Tandy? Is that what you’re saying?”
Beneath Tandy’s feet, the floorboards creaked. He was sweating now. He smelled his own odor.
Through the inverted letters on the front window, Leighton watched his brother shamble across the intersection at Main and First, his head down, his eyes on the ground. He looked whipped, the very picture of failure and dejection, until he heard the sound of a horse’s hooves and looked up. Sally Stark, the wife of a local planter, was driving along in a carriage. Instantly, Tandy’s bearing changed. Straightening himself up to his full height, he doffed his fedora and swept it through the air, then executed a graceful bow.
Sally Stark pulled back on the reins, and the horse slowed down. Leighton watched while her face broke into a smile. Her lips formed a single word.
Tandy!
The house stood on the banks of Loring Bayou.A big white house surrounded by a white picket fence, it had a broad veranda overhung by cedars, pecan trees and locusts. Leighton had designed it himself, in concert with his father-in-law, and it had cost him $2,500. Tonight, it was brightly lit.
Walking up from the street, he heard music: Sarah playing the piano, Tandy singing “Danny Boy.” For a moment, he stopped and listened. He’d always loved hearing Tandy sing, but if he was in the room while the singing was going on, Leighton had to shut his eyes to enjoy it. Seeing the man behind the voice ruined the effect.
They had just finished the final chorus when he opened the door. Tandy was clean now, his pants and jacket sparkling white, his boots shining in the lamplight, though they still looked a little worn around the toes. He’d shaved and waxed his mustache and combed his hair.
He stood beside the piano. Sarah’s cheeks were rosy, and she was smiling up at him. Upstairs, in a walnut cabinet near the bed, there was a photograph of her sitting beside Tandy in a buggy. In the picture, she wore a lace dress and a tall hat with taffeta trim, and she was looking at him with that same bright smile on display.
Tandy was at home among women, always able to make them smile, whereas Leighton never quite felt comfortable in their presence. He liked them and wanted to be around them, but whenever they were near, he became aware of his size. He tended to bend toward them, ducking his head in compensation. More often than not, they instinctively pulled away.
“That sounded pretty darn good,” he said. He removed his hat, hung it on the rack and walked over and laid his hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “Maybe y’all could go on the road and make some money.”
“Tandy can’t make money. It’s beneath him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s beneath me. I’d say it’s somewhere off to the side.”
“It seems there are some people in New Orleans to whom Tandy owes more than six thousand dollars.”
“Give or take a dollar or two.”
“And they’ve suggested he might come to harm.”
“They’re not bad folks. They’re just a little too quick to rile.”
“So Tandy is here, as it were, in hiding.”
She hadn’t looked at Leighton since he’d walked in. He willed himself now to lift his hand from her shoulder, but he couldn’t. She was wearing a voile frock so sheer his fingertips could feel her pulse through the fabric. He felt the heat of her body as well, and something else—moisture, the sheen of perspiration on her skin. His free hand rose as if of its own volition; he almost laid it on her other shoulder and caressed her. What stopped him was the sight of a blackish smear on his palm. His hands had always looked rough, and now they frequently bore ink stains. He could never quite get them all off.
“Tandy can’t hide,” he said. “Tandy draws crowds like a dog draws fleas.”
They sat at the supper table, lingering over the remains of an apple pie Sarah had baked that afternoon. Tandy was telling a story about his adventures in New Orleans.
“So the driver, he looks over his shoulder at me and says, ‘The one on the left, sir, he rough-gaited, and the one on the right, well, she a shirker. This crushed gravel on the street, it get up in the frog on the horse’s foot, and it can make ’em go lame. Well, the one on the right there, she know I know that, so she start acting like that what’s done happened. But there’s one other thing she know I know. She know I know her just as well as she know me.’ And you know what the driver did then?”
“No,” Will said. “What’d he do, Uncle Tandy?”
“Well, he pulled the whip out of the socket and whacked the mare on her tail. But instead of picking up her pace, she got her tail up over the dashboard and cut loose with about five or six pounds of the stinky stuff.”
Will burst out laughing.
“Tandy!” Sarah said.
“The old nigger was naturally the color of blackstrap molasses, but when the horse did that, he gagged and turned green. He had to pull his hat off and hold it over his face all the way back to Jackson Square. Tell you the truth, it like to killed me, too.”
“Yeah,” Leighton said. “It just about killed me now to listen to it.”
He glanced at Will. He was nine, a tall skinny boy who sometimes got so excited he forgot to eat. He also forgot to sleep.
“It’s about time for you to go to bed, son.”
“Daddy!” Will balled his hands up into fists.
“William Lee Payne,” Sarah said. “Can you imagine your father or your uncle behaving like that if their father had told them to go to bed?”
Face sullen, Will kissed Sarah good night, then walked over and leaned against Leighton.
“Good night, son.”
“Night.”
On his way out, he paused long enough to shake hands with Tandy. “You’ll still be here tomorrow?”
“For tomorrow and for many days to co...
In 1902, in a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, nearly a generation after the end of slavery, events obscured by time but impossible to forgive or forget echo in the lives of blacks and whites alike. As bound together by history as they are separated by mutual distrust, the citizens of Loring face present tensions as they look toward an uncertain future.
Into this charged atmosphere rides Tandy Payne–prodigal son of a prominent planter and brother of the current mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate. When he takes advantage of a perceived slight from the town’s black postmistress, the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by dark and brutal memories, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside. Steve Yarbrough confronts character with morality, reason with blood, in this moving novel that explores the farthest boundaries of human nature.
Into this charged atmosphere rides Tandy Payne–prodigal son of a prominent planter and brother of the current mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate. When he takes advantage of a perceived slight from the town’s black postmistress, the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by dark and brutal memories, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside. Steve Yarbrough confronts character with morality, reason with blood, in this moving novel that explores the farthest boundaries of human nature.
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- ÉditeurPicador
- Date d'édition2002
- ISBN 10 0330486381
- ISBN 13 9780330486385
- ReliureBroché
- Nombre de pages288
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