(ebook) Capote Truman The Grass harp

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thinned my excitement. Dolly said, "I can't see there's any harm. But you ought to have a clean
shirt: I could plant turnips in the collar of that one."
The field of grass was without voice, no pheasant rustle, furtive flurry; the pointed leaves
were sharp and blood-red as the aftermath arrows of a massacre; their brittieness broke beneath
our feet as we waded up the hill into the cemetery. The view from there is very fine: the
limitless trembling surface of River Woods, fifty unfolding miles of ploughed, wind-milled
farmland, far-off the spired courthouse tower, smoking chimneys of town. I stopped by the
graves of my mother and father. I had not often visited them, it depressed me, the tomb-cold
stone-so unlike what I remembered of them, their aliveness, how she'd cried when he went
away to sell his frigid-aires, how he'd run naked into the street. I wanted flowers for the
terracotta jars sitting empty on the streaked and muddied marble. Riley helped me; he tore
beginning buds off a japonica tree, and watching me arrange them, said: "I'm glad your ma was
nice. Bitches, by and large." I wondered if he meant his own mother, poor Rose Henderson,
who used to make him hop around (he yard reciting the multiplication table. It did seem to me,
though, that he'd made up for those hard days. After all, he had a car that was supposed to have
cost three thousand dollars. Second-hand, mind you. It was a foreign car, an Alfa-Romeo
roadster (Romeo's Alfa, the joke was) he'd bought in New Orleans from a politician bound for
the penitentiary.
As we purred along the unpaved road toward town I kept hoping for a witness: there were
certain persons it would have done my heart good to have seen me sailing by in Riley Hen-
derson's car. But it was too early for anyone much to be about; breakfast was still on the stove,
and smoke soared out the chimneys of passing houses. We turned the comer by the church,
drove around the square and parked in the dirt lane that runs between Cooper's Livery and the
Katydid Bakery. There Riley left me with orders to stay put: he wouldn't be more than an hour.
So, stretching out on the seat, I listened to the chicanery of thieving sparrows in the livery
stable's haystacks, breathed the fresh bread, tart as currant odors escaping from the bakery. The
couple who owned this bakery, County was their name, Mr. and Mrs. C. C. County, had to
begin their day at three in the morning to be ready by opening time, eight o'clock. It was a clean
prosperous place. Mrs. County could afford the most expensive clothes at Verena's drygoods
store. While I lay there smelling the good things, the back door of the bakery opened and Mr.
County, broom in hand, swept flour dust into the lane. I guess he was surprised to see Riley's
car, and surprised to find me in it.
"What you up to. Coffin?"
"Up to nothing, Mr. County," I said, and asked myself if he knew about our trouble.
"Sure am happy October's here," he said, rubbing the air with his fingers as though the chill
woven into it was a material he could feel. "We have a terrible time in the summer: ovens and
all make it too hot to live. See here, son, there's a gingerbread man waiting for you-come on in
and run him down."
Now he was not the kind of man to get me in there and then call the Sheriff.
His wife welcomed me into the spiced heat of the oven room as though she could think of
nothing pleasanter than my being there. Most anyone would have liked Mrs. County. A chunky
woman with no fuss about her, she had elephant ankles, developed arms, a muscular face
permanently fire-flushed; her eyes were like blue cake-icing, her hair looked as if she'd mopped
it around in a flour barrel, and she wore an apron that trailed to the tips of her toes. Her husband
also wore one; sometimes, with the fulsome apron still tied around him, I'd seen him crossing
the street to have a time-off beer with the men that lean around the comer at Phil's Cafe: he
seemed a painted clown, flopping, powdered, elegantly angular.
Clearing a place on her work table, Mrs. County set me down to a cup of coffee and a warm
tray of cinnamon rolls, the kind Dolly relished. Mr. County suggested I might prefer something
else: "I promised him, what did I promise? a gingerbread man." His wife socked a lump of
dough: "Those are for kids. He's a grown man; or nearly. Collin, just how old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"Same as Samuel," she said, meaning her son, whom we all called Mule: inasmuch as he was
not much brighter than one. I asked what was their news of him? because the previous autumn,
after having been left back in the eighth grade three years running. Mule had gone to Pensacola
and joined the Navy. "He's in Panama, last we heard," she said, flattening the dough into a
piecrust. "We don't hear often. I wrote him once, I said Samuel you do better about writing
home or I'm going to write the President exactly how old you are. Because you know he joined
up under false pretenses. I was darned mad at the time-blamed Mr. Hand up at the schoolhouse:
that's why Samuel did it, he just couldn't tolerate always being left behind in the eighth grade,
him getting so tall and the other children so little. But now I can see Mr. Hand was right: it
wouldn't be fair to the rest of you boys if they promoted Samuel when he didn't do his work
proper. So maybe it turned out for the best. C. C., show Collin the picture."
Photographed against a background of palms and real sea, four smirking sailors stood with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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