A Place to Call Home by Deborah Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

thin, watery stream of vomit dripped from his mouth, and he dragged an arm across his lips. But he managed to keep his head up and he scrutinized me with his unwavering gray eyes.
    “That’s for Neely Tipton,” I told him, saving him a thank-you. “And for everything Arlan and Harold do to you. Now we’re even.”
    He nodded weakly.
    The battle had only lasted thirty seconds. By now Mama and everybody else had run out to us, and Edna Fae McClendon’s lousy husband straggled over, and he and Edna Fae helped Roanie drag his father to the truck and hoist him into the back.
    “Did I kill him?” I asked Mama tearfully.
    “No,” she said, putting one arm around my shoulders. She held her revolver in her other hand. “I’m afraid not.”
    “Mama, he said Sally got her little boy from Uncle Pete.”
    Mama’s mouth flattened. Color zoomed up her cheeks. “There’s some things we don’t talk about.”
    “But Uncle Pete comes down here to visit Sally all the time! I heard all about it and—”
    “
Claire Karleen
. What your uncle does when he visits is nobody’s business and nothing but gossip. Forget about it.”
    Roanie didn’t say a word. He climbed into the truck’s cab. Twelve years old and hauling his drunk, passed-outdaddy home on Easter Sunday, humiliation stretching every inch of his face. I couldn’t let him go like that. I sprinted around to the trunk of Aunt Dockey’s Cadillac. The lid wasn’t fastened. I shoved it up and grabbed the giant chocolate rabbit from my basket. Mama had wrapped it in wax paper.
    I ran to the truck as Roanie cranked the engine. He stared at me warily as I leaped up on the sideboard. I thrust the rabbit into his lap. “You take this,” I said, crying. “This is from me to you. It’s not ’cause it’s Easter, and it’s not ’cause of Jesus, and it’s not for charity. It’s because I
like
you. You take this rabbit and you eat him!”
    He swallowed hard. He shrugged. I struggled not to pull back from the stink of vomit and garbage and unwashed clothes.
    After he drove away, I handed out Easter baskets to that pack of quiet, fearful McClendon kids. Sally ran into her house carrying her little boy. Uncle Pete’s son. My cousin. It was true. We couldn’t talk about it, but it was true.
    I didn’t make even one of those McClendon kids beg me for some Easter eggs with a “Please” or a “Thank you.” I was so ashamed of all of us.
    One of Daddy’s cousins, Vince O’Brien, Ruby’s husband, was the town sheriff. Ruby told him what had happened and he sent a couple of deputies over to the Hollow to make sure Big Roan hadn’t killed Roanie later. But Big Roan was still asleep in the back of the truck. The deputies said Roanie had taken off into the hills, anyway. He’d learned when to disappear.
    I was much praised and told that I’d done a good, Christian deed, like David with Goliath. Evan tried to read me the Bible story, but I told him to shut up and leave me alone, I needed to think.
    I had too much, and Roanie had nothing. From that day forward I vowed to save him from the evil that pervaded our lives.

I didn’t get to see Roanie much for the next couple of years, especially after he entered Dunderry High, but I heard about him regularly.
    “Roanie Sullivan showed up at school with a big knot on his forehead,” Hop told us one night. “I heard he caught Arlan and Harold knocking his mailbox again and they took a swing at him.”
    “Do something, Mama,” I begged. “They’ll bust his brains out.”
    Mama sighed and looked at her mother. But Grandmother Elizabeth insisted Arlan and Harold would have turned out gentler if their mother, Uncle Pete’s wife, hadn’t died young. They were her grandsons after all. “Men need a full-fledged mother in attendance throughout their childhood in order to refine them,” Grandmother Elizabeth said unhappily.
    Great-Gran Alice snorted. “Pete’s a no-account, and you raised him.”
    Grandmother Elizabeth began