Chaneysville Incident

Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley Read Free Book Online
Authors: David Bradley
for the path with the toe of my sneaker.
    The path was clear but the hillside dropped away; I had to fight to stay on course, to avoid being dragged off into the underbrush by the force of gravity. I began to be really frightened, recalling the stories about how once Old Jack and Snakebelly White reached the far side of the Hill they became something other than human. Boogeymen. But I thought it out, and reasoned that if being there changed them, then it ought to change me too. Now I was a boogeyman, and it would serve everybody well to stay out of my way. I moved on steadily for a few hundred yards, and then the path went diving almost straight down the slope again, twisting and turning between trees and boulders, but always heading down. I went with it, but more carefully this time, lowering my body to the point where I was almost sitting in the dirt and sliding. On either side of me the underbrush rose in purplish-black billows, and honeysuckle vines crawled over the trees and rocks like snakes. In a few more yards I came out of the trees into a clearing. By then my eyes had adjusted; I could see a little. What I saw was the outline of a cabin made of weatherbeaten wood and bejeweled with softly glimmering patches made of flattened tin cans. I knew it was Old Jack’s house; I did not know how I knew, but I knew. Somehow I found the courage to move forward, but I was not without wariness; I got down on my hands and knees and crept forward as quietly as I could, hoping to detect the boogeyman before he detected me. It took me so long to reach the cabin I lost track of time. When I did reach it I crept around it, looking for a window to peer through and finding none. In a sudden burst of courage I got to my feet and moved to the door and reached up for the knob, but found instead a latch string. Then the unfamiliarity, the strangeness of it hit me. The night grew darker and suddenly silent. I trembled. I backed away, my eyes fixed on the door. I turned to run. And found myself staring at the boogeyman himself, holding a shotgun pointed at my head. “God, boy,” the boogeyman said, “you near to got your head blowed off. If you’re gonna sneak, for Ned’s sake, sneak !”
    The shack looked much as it always had: an improbably ugly structure leaning defiantly against the pull of gravity and the weight of time, the boards of weird grayish-green from the effects of weather. Once, when they had come to take the census, they had asked me (nobody, not even a representative of the federal government, was going to go over there to find out if Old Jack had an indoor bathroom, and I was the only person who would know) whether the house was deteriorating, dilapidated, or unfit for human habitation. (The census-taker had paused for a moment, trying to figure out a way to explain the terms to a twelve-year-old, who, presumably, did not understand them.) It had been a hard question, and I had said finally that it was dilapidated, an evaluation I happened on by elimination: the house could not be unfit for human habitation since Old Jack, who, I knew by then, was thoroughly human, lived there quite happily; nor could it be deteriorating—it had gone to ruin long before I was born. The census-taker had shaken her head and made clucking sounds, but that I really did not understand; Old Jack’s house seemed fine to me. Then an outhouse was still an adventure, and so was getting water from the spring and transporting it in a galvanized bucket. Although I had never tried it, I imagined that bathing—if you ever did—in a big tin tub was the acme of bliss.
    But my perceptions had changed over the years; now the shack looked as if it might be unfit for human habitation. And not only the shack, but the land around it; the whole scene, ravaged by winter, treated harshly by the morning light, foretold disaster. There was no grass to soften the impression as there was in the summer, no flowers blooming in the three old coal scuttles that he

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