Heed the Thunder by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online

Methodists, them that ain’t Baptists and Christians. My sister Myrtle and her husband are Episcopalians, but I don’t count them.”
    “Well, I’m not anything really,” the salesman confessed. “Just a Protestant. But I keep my ear to the ground when it comes to religion, and I could tell you things you wouldn’t believe, Sherm! Yessir, they’d make your hair stand on end! Now, you think those hunkies are giving you the go-by just to favor their own kin, but that ain’t it at all. That’s only part of it. All these bohunks and Poles and Rooshans are acting under direct orders from the Pope. They never make a move that the Pope don’t tell ’em to. It’s a conspiracy, Sherm. They’re plotting to drive the Christians out with fire and sword, and take over in the Pope’s name, just like they did over in Europe. They’ll do it, too, if us Christians don’t do something to stop them!”
    Sherman laughed shortly. He coughed and spat, and looked slyly at the salesman from the corner of his eyes. In that moment, except for the differences of age, he was the picture of Lincoln Fargo. He judged that the Pope cared as little about having him a convert as he cared about being one. He figured that any bunch of hunkies that could grab his farm would probably earn it in the doing. He said as much, in his exasperated, cream-separator voice, and put a period to the subject with a snort.
    Sherman did not like to have his credulity imposed upon. He considered that it had been.
    If Simpson had been a little less expert as a salesman than he was, he would not have sold the thresher. But, being what he was, he laughed heartily at his own discomfiture, shifted the conversation to horses, and thence back to farm implements.
    By the time they drove up to the farm, he had committed Sherman to the purchase of a new mower and a riding plow, in addition to the thresher.

5
    P earl Fargo—Mrs. Lincoln Fargo—stood in front of the warped mahogany-framed mirror in her bedroom and applied the tip of a burned match to her scanty eyebrows. She knew as well as the next one that God frowned on his painted daughters, that, having created woman as He wanted her, He looked upon alteration of His work as blasphemy. But, she reflected determinedly, she was not so much changing His handiwork as renewing it. She had turned stark gray that summer, she thought, what with Edie and that young’un of hers. A body couldn’t go in her own kitchen without Edie being there, putting everything at odd ends and playing like she was a help. She wished she’d just go off and sit down somewheres, and leave a body to do things like they was supposed to be done. She wished she’d just go off. As for that young’un, Bobbie, it was a mighty good thing he wasn’t her kid. She’d teach him to speak when he was spoken to. She’d blister him five times a day and send him to bed without his supper until he learned how to mind. She’d teach him how to go around poking his nose into other people’s things.…Of course, Pa was always putting him up to meanness, but Pa was Pa. This was his home, and he was getting old. The trouble was that young’un needed to have his hide tanned.
    She let down her hair, so thin that it was like a fragment of combed-out rope, and began to brush it. There was a jar of strong tea on her dresser; she always kept it there. She dipped the end of the brush in that, drawing it through her mousy, corn-silk hair. It didn’t do a body any harm to make themselves look decent; the Book didn’t say anything against tea. If some people she knew had paid a little more attention to the way they looked, things’d be a lot better than they were, maybe. A man always had his reasons for what he did. He didn’t go off just for nothing.
    She frowned, suddenly, and stood staring into the mirror, her nose wrinkled. With a sort of slow dread, she put down the brush and lifted the jar of tea. Angry, disgusted, she set the jar down with a bang and some of