Father and Son by Larry Brown Read Free Book Online

the path. He ran easily, breathing steadily, the sweat coiling down his back and his arms slowly pumping. His dog yapped once and growled and he yelled for it to be quiet as he drew nearer. At the crest of the hill he slowed to a walk and put his hands on his hips. He could see Lucinda on the porch still shelling peas. She’d been there all day and there was some ungodly number of peas in a washtub beside her.
    He walked up to the porch and stood there for a second. She didn’t look up.
    â€œYou still shellin them peas?”
    She sat with her dark legs spread and a big dishpan nestled in the hollowsling her dress made between her massive thighs. She was throwing the hulls into some grocery sacks scattered around her.
    â€œAin’t had nobody to help me,” she said.
    â€œWhat about them younguns?”
    â€œThem younguns in the bed.”
    Her lower lip was pooched out and she gave an enormous sigh but her fingers never stopped their steady motions. He knew she’d heard the shots.
    â€œWhat’s all that mess down there?” she said.
    He turned his head and looked into the black woods for a moment.
    â€œWhite folks’ business,” he said, and stepped up on the porch and went inside. The dog came up out of the yard and climbed the porch and sniffed at the peas and sniffed at the hulls and then it sniffed at Lucinda’s bare toes and licked one of her feet.
    â€œGit on outta here you old soup bone,” she said, and the dog sat. Rufus came back out with a glass of iced tea and sat down on the top step with his pipe and a small tin of Prince Albert. Lucinda sat there shelling their peas.
    â€œI wish you’d git some other place to work,” she said. “All them drunks down there. He don’t do nothin but lay drunk hisself. Don’t pay you nothin.”
    Rufus was loading his pipe. “I know it,” he said. He got it loaded and pulled a kitchen match from his pocket and struck it on a board beside him and lit the pipe, drawing deep on it, holding the flame over it, until he shook the match out and dropped it in the yard. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the money and kept ten and handed the rest to her. She took it and looked at it. He puffed on his pipe and scratched the back of his head.
    â€œIs that it?”
    â€œThat’s it.”
    â€œHuh. You think we gonna feed them younguns on that? You bed not go back down yonder tonight neither. You hear me?”
    Rufus didn’t answer. He had heard the separate and distinct concussions of the pistol and the shotgun as they spoke to each other. It was plain to him that the shotgun had spoken loudest and he knew he had to go back.
    The door was open and the lights were on when Rufus mounted the porch. He looked past the dead monkey whose fur was speckled with glass dust, tiny points of light shining, saw the blood on the wall and the holes in the wall and the shattered bottles and mirror. He looked at the front of the bar and saw the splintered wood. There was no sound and he began to wish he had listened to his woman.
    He went forward into the room on quiet feet, but he was very conscious of the noise he made as the floorboards creaked. The register was opened and robbed, the chrome clamps that held the bills pressed down all standing straight up. He was afraid to lean over and see what was behind the bar because he knew already what he would find. Knowing didn’t help because he still had to look at him, so he looked. Barlow was on the floor behind the bar. He couldn’t see all of him. He could see the bloodied sleeve on one arm, and part of his bloody head, and one twisted leg.
    A board groaned behind him, a chair kicked over.
    Rufus froze and said, “I don’t mess in no white folks’ business.”
    A strange moan came from behind the bar. He heard with full clarity the cocking of a hammer, the thin tiny click that was loud in that hushed place, like the tick of the