Dark Don't Catch Me by Vin Packer Read Free Book Online Page A

home, her father said: “That Hollis Jordan you was talking to, Ada?”
    â€œJust walking a piece with him. Not saying much.”
    â€œHe’s crazy!” her father said.
    â€œSure is!” she said.
    That night Ada took the red autograph book she’d been saving for the Christmas Club Frolic, and turned it into a dairy.
    â€œWhy do I care so much about what people say all the time?” was all she wrote on the first mint-shaded page….
    After that there were other times; more times than most knew or cared about. Ada’s father was a widower who worked hard at farming, and made no bones about visiting Mary Jane Frances Alexander’s establishment for relaxation. He saved his money religiously, and worried about sending Ada up to Athens to college when she finished at High; and when Ada told him sometimes she had had conversation with Hollis Jordan, he listened and grunted and likened it in his mind to the way her mother used to take in any stray hound that bayed within a mile of their place, and gab at it like it was human.
    â€œWhat’s he talk about?” he’d asked her once.
    â€œOh, nothing.”
    â€œThey say he’s educated.”
    â€œSome,” playing it down.
    â€œHe’s crazy!”
    â€œNot so much.”
    â€œEven a little’s too much.”
    â€œI know it,” Ada would say. “He reads poetry aloud.”
    Sometimes, just so she could talk about him, she made fun of him, because that was the only way anyone talked about Hollis Jordan in Paradise. She had a hunger to say his name; to tell things he said to her — not everything, though; and then she felt a certain sorry grief when her girl friends would laugh at what she told them, even though the way she told them was amusing and meant to be a joke.
    â€œYou mean he made you get down and feel the earth?” they’d scream uproariously.
    â€œThat’s the truth.” Ada would giggle, with her heart aching. “He said, ‘Ada, feel it! Feel this land with your fingers! Smell it and taste it! Roll in it and it’ll make you clean and true!” I said, ‘Roll in it, Hollis Jordan?
Roll
in it!”
    â€œ ‘N what’d he say then, Ada?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know,” she’d answer them; suddenly tired of the game she was playing against herself. “I guess he read some of his crazy old poetry.”
    He read poetry almost all the time to her, and she to him, reading poems he had selected for her, as though their first meeting when they had read together was to establish the pattern of their future meetings. While she saw him more times than anyone but he or she knew, there was no regularity to those intervals; and they were spaced weeks and often months apart. She would walk purposely to the woods to find him, and at times she would find him; other times, merely sit there in the clearing alone, wondering about him, and wondering what was happening to her because of him.
    Never once until the day of their humiliation did Hollis Jordan speak to her of any feeling he might have had other than a friendly one. What she never got used to about Hollis when they were together was the way he would tell her things about herself, which a man to Ada’s mind didn’t tell a girl unless there was something between them. The third time they were ever together, out in back of his place, when she was watching him mend a fence worn in with the wind, he stopped what he was doing suddenly and said, “You have fine legs. Are you going to college?”
    She never knew how to answer him when he said things like that. She even loathed him some, imagining the dirty pictures in his mind. Yet at night sometimes for no reason she would wake up restless and warm; take off her flannel nightgown, and stand naked before the open window in the cold breeze and wish she had a reason to cry….
    Hollis and she grew on one another like intertwining vines