Carry Me Home by Sandra Kring Read Free Book Online Page B

a regular pair of socks, then slip one of them wool pairs over ’em, ’cause it’s colder than a witch’s tit now that it’s December. I race down the stairs so fast I almost fall on my ass.
    “I’m going over to Eddie’s,” I tell Dad, and he nods. By this time of year, it seems like it just gets light and it starts getting dark again. By the time Eddie gets home from school and eats his supper, and by the time Ma and me lock up the store and have our supper, it’s blacker than a bear’s ass and I can’t go nowhere. I gotta wait ’til Sundays to have any fun in the winter.
    I stand inside Eddie’s front door, my boots staying on the rug so I don’t slop up his ma’s waxed floor. Her and Eddie are decorating the Christmas tree they got propped in the corner, even though it won’t be Christmas for a lot more days. “Can Eddie come out and play?” I ask.
    “Well, we were decorating the tree,” his ma says. Her name is Pearl McCarty, and she is short and turkey-fat like Eddie. She is real nice.
    I look at the tree. “Maybe you should let Eddie come out and play instead,” I say, “’cause it don’t look like he knows how to decorate a tree real good anyhow. He’s got all them bulbs in that one spot right there, and the rest of that tree looks butt-naked.” Eddie’s ma laughs a little, but she stops laughing when Eddie asks her if I can help decorate the tree too.
    “The decorating can wait until later, Eddie,” she says, then she comes over to me ’cause I’m standing close to where the front closet is, and she gets out Eddie’s winter stuff.
    “We probably ain’t gonna have a tree this year,” I tell her. “Ma said she don’t even feel like having Christmas this year, ’cause Jimmy ain’t coming home for Christmas anyway.”
    “Oh, your poor mother,” Pearl McCarty says as she starts stuffing Eddie into his brown snowsuit. “Where is your brother now, Earl? Is he in Kentucky, or Louisiana? He’s in the National Guard, right? Oh, I just can’t keep track of whose son is where anymore.”
    “He ain’t in neither place, Mrs. McCarty. First he went to a place called Fort Knox, and him and Floyd and the rest of them Janesville guys, they got sweared in to the real army and now they is Company A of the 192nd Battalion. That’s a tank battalion.” I can’t help feeling proud when I tell her this stuff, ’cause I had to have Dad tell me them numbers lots of times before I remembered ’em good enough to tell people when they ask about Jimmy. “Then last summer, they got sent to some other camp. I can’t remember where. They was learning more about how to be soldiers there. He liked it there too. They had to work hard, but Jimmy is tough, so he didn’t mind. They played cards there, and guys who could play music played for ’em at night. They had a baseball team too, and Jimmy pitched and his team didn’t get beat, not even once.”
    Eddie’s ma is stuffing Eddie’s hands, round and white like two snowballs, into his mittens. Eddie starts fussing ’cause his thumb ain’t in the thumb part, and his ma takes the mitten off and starts over. “Well, Jimmy was always real good at baseball,” she says.
    “He sure always was, ma’am,” I say. “But Jimmy ain’t there no more. He wrote around Halloween time, and that letter come clear from San Francisco. That’s way across the country, Mrs. McCarty, ’case you don’t know that. Jimmy and Floyd and the rest of them guys, they were at some ‘deplortment’ place they called it, where they got shots so they don’t get the tetanus, ’cause they was getting shipped overseas—that means they had to go across the ocean.”
    “I hate shots, Earlwig,” Eddie says, and I tell him I know that already.
    Eddie’s ma is shoving Eddie’s feet into his boots, and she is grunting real hard. “Straighten your toes and push, Eddie.” Then she says to me, “Where overseas, Earl?”
    “Well, they taked a ship over to this place called