Benediction by Kent Haruf Read Free Book Online Page A

said.
    His wife and son didn’t say anything.
    That was an example of love for anyone to see.
    He took out from his shirt pocket the fifty-dollar bill and set it on the table.
    I’m going to put this money in the World Mission Fund. I think it’s important to use
     this particular bill and not some other or some check but this one specifically. I
     won’t use his name. Let it be anonymous. It represents a half, better than half a
     day’s work for that boy. Maybe even a whole day. Something good should come of it.
     Nobody but the three of us will ever know. An anonymous gift. To somebody somewhere
     else in the world who needs it without the giver even knowing he’s made the gift.
    Later in the evening while Lyle was out of the house making calls at the hospital,
     John Wesley went into his parents’ bedroom at the top of the stairs. His mother, a
     pretty dark-eyed woman, lay in bed reading, the bedside lamp shone onto her face and
     shoulders. She had on a summer nightgown and her shoulders were bare. She pulled the
     sheet up and put down her book. The boy stood at the foot of the bed.
    Why does he have to talk like that? It makes me sick.
    Don’t talk about him that way.
    He’s not preaching here. At the table to us. But he still sounds like he’s preaching
     or pointing up some moral.
    He means well, you know that. He was trying to tell us about something that was important
     to him.
    He’s full of shit, Mom.
    Don’t talk like that. It’s not true.
    It is. I can’t stand it when he sounds like that.
    Be patient, you’ll be gone to college before long.
    Two years from now. I want to go back to Denver.
    We’re living here now.
    These kids are all going to be hicks. You know they are.
    You’ll find someone to like. You didn’t like everybody in Denver either, don’t forget.
    I liked some of them. I still have friends there. I’m never going to have any friends
     here.
    Yes you will. Somebody’ll come along.
    You don’t have anybody here yourself.
    We just got here. I have your father and you.
    The boy looked at her and looked at himself in the bureau mirror. You don’t have him
     very much.
    Don’t say that.
    I haven’t forgotten what happened in Denver.
    I know and I wish it had never happened. Go to bed. You’ll feel different tomorrow.

8
    I T WAS HER WAY , Willa’s manner and her character to keep the house clean and in good repair out
     in the country east of Holt though few people drove by to see it and almost no one
     ever visited and entered it. A white house, with blue shutters and a blue shingled
     roof. The outbuildings were all painted a deep barn red with white trim and they were
     in good condition too though they had not been used for thirty years, since her husband
     had died.
    She still drove a car. Her eyes were failing but not so much nor so fast that she
     was ready to give up driving. She had the thick prescriptive glasses. She leased the
     land to the neighbor and he had black cattle in the pastures and did the haying and
     what he paid her was enough to live on if she were careful. She liked seeing the cattle
     standing at the stock tank at the corral beyond the barn. She liked the sound of the
     windmill working and cranking, the sight of the spouting water. She still kept a garden
     and she canned the vegetables and fruit and gave most of it away, and went into church
     on Sundays and attended various church meetings and served on the boards and did her
     grocery shopping on Wednesdays and ate in the Wagon Wheel restaurant on the highway
     east of town. Now her daughter had come home again.
    On a hot day in June she and Alene went into town and ate and then shopped for groceries
     at the Highway 34 Grocery Store, then they drove past the Lewis house on the west
     side of town and droveslowly past the yellow house next door where Alice lived with Berta May and they both
     envied the other old woman. They didn’t see the girl out in the yard as they had hoped
     so that they