April Morning by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

Abraham Cooper had many fine qualities, something I will not deny, but he was just as pigheaded and stubborn and enamored of the sound of his own voice as you are.”
    â€œGranny, you’re being too hard on Moses,” Mother put in.
    â€œOh, no—not at all, Goody Cooper. Like yourself, I was married to a Cooper, so I had double experience. Now you two can go on and make anything out of this that you wish. I shouldn’t be interfering anyway, because it’s provoking enough to have a mother-in-law in the home without her telling you how to raise up your children. I’ve said my say. Good night to both of you!”
    They knew better to interrupt or stop Granny when she began to talk like that, and they sat quietly while she stamped upstairs. When she passed my door, I whispered:
    â€œGranny?”
    â€œAnd you, Adam Cooper,” she hissed, “don’t go thinking that because I scold my own son, I’m on your side.”
    â€œI love you anyway,” I whispered.
    â€œWhen I was young, a boy had modesty and decency, two qualities that seem to have disappeared today.” She went on past into her room, and everything became so silent that I could hear the ticking of the big old clock on the staircase. Then from below, his voice considerably chastened, my father said:
    â€œWell, Sarah, she is my mother.”
    â€œI don’t see how it gives her the right to talk to you the way she does. You’re a grown man, not a boy.”
    â€œShe doesn’t mean anything by it.”
    â€œWell, it’s disrespect. I will not budge an inch from that. You’re the man of the house. I said before and I say again—it is certainly disrespectful.”
    There were a few minutes of silence after that, and then Father said, “Come to think about it, I have been hard on the boy. That doesn’t mean I don’t love him. You know how much he means to me.”
    â€œOf course I do.”
    â€œI mean I got to disabuse him of that notion.”
    â€œMoses, if you keep building it up in your mind that way, you won’t sleep a wink tonight.”
    â€œI just don’t understand how he could form a notion that I don’t care for him.”
    â€œYou said yourself that those things don’t last. Now give me a book and I’ll read to you.”
    I heard Father get up and go into the sitting room, and a moment or two later, in that high, clear, school-marm voice that she uses for reading aloud, Mother began chapter four of Pilgrim’s Progress, which rated almost as highly in our house as the Bible, and most of which I knew by heart.
    I fell asleep to the sound of her voice. My eyes were wet and my throat thick and full, but I think I felt better as I fell asleep than I had felt in a long time.

The Night
    I DON’T BELIEVE in dreams—that is, I don’t believe that dreams amount to any more than tossing around the things that worry and provoke a body during his waking hours. Other folk are different and set a great store by dreams, picking them apart and developing them to distraction. I don’t recall any event of importance, whether it was old man Higgens having a stroke, or the time a fox got in with the Phittses’ chickens and killed eleven of them, that didn’t produce a host of soothsayers, all claiming to have dreamed every detail in advance. I guess that if it proves anything, it only proves that what with everybody dreaming every night, there’s always something for any occasion.
    And thinking about it, I will admit that this point of view came from my father. Father liked to describe himself as a Christian-Judaic materialist. He held that if he just named himself a Christian, it was likely to take on at least some aspects of partnership with the Church of England. The Church of England was one of the things—one of the very few things, I should say—that he couldn’t argue about. Not that he wasn’t willing;