Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Read Free Book Online

should’ve seen her leg, Joel Knox. It swelled up like a watermelon; all her hair fell out; oh, she was dogsick for two months, and Mama and me had to wait on her hand and foot.”
    “It’s lucky she didn’t die,” said Joel.
    “I would’ve if I was you and didn’t know how to take care of myself,” said Idabel.
    “She was smart, all right,” conceded Florabel. “She just went smack in the chicken yard and snatched up this rooster and ripped him wide open; never heard such squawking. Hot chicken blood draws the poison.”
    “You ever been snakebit, boy?” Idabel wanted to know.
    “No,” he said, feeling somehow in the wrong, “but I was nearly run over by a car once.”
    Idabel seemed to consider this. “Run over by a car,” she said, her woolly voice tinged with envy.
    “Now you oughtn’t to have told her that,” snapped Florabel. “She’s liable to run straight off and throw herself in the middle of the highway.”
    Below the road and in the shallow woods a close-by creek’s sliding, pebble-tinkling rush underlined the bellowed comments of hidden frogs. The slow-rolling wagon cleared a slope and started down again. Idabel picked the petals from the dogwood spray, dripping them in her path, and tossed the rind aside; she tilted her head and faced the sky and began to hum; then she sang: “When the north-wind doth blow, and we shall have snow, what does the robin do then, poor thing?” Florabel took up the tune: “He got to the barn, to keep he-self warm, and hide he-self under he wing, poor thing!” It was a lively song and they sang it over and over till Joel joined to make a trio; their voices pealed clear and sweet, for all three were sopranos, and Florabel vivaciously strummed a mythical banjo. Then a cloud crossed the moon and in the black the singing ended.
    Florabel jumped off the wagon. “Our house is over in there,” she said, pointing toward what looked to Joel like an empty wilderness. “Don’t forget . . . come to visit.”
    “I will,” he called, but already the tide of darkness had washed the twins from sight.
    Sometime later a thought of them echoed, receded, left him suspecting they were perhaps what he’d first imagined: apparitions. He touched his cheek, the cornhusks, glanced at the sleeping Jesus—the old man was trancelike but for his body’s rubbery response to the wagon’s jolting—and was reassured. The guide reins jangled, the hoofbeats of the mule made a sound as drowsy as a fly’s bzzz on a summer afternoon. A jungle of stars rained down to cover him in blaze, to blind and close his eyes. Arms akimbo, legs crumpled, lips vaguely parted—he looked as if sleep had struck him with a blow.
    Fence posts suddenly loomed; the mule came alive, began to trot, almost to gallop down a graveled lane over which the wheels spit stone; and Jesus Fever, jarred conscious, tugged at the reins: “Whoa, John Brown, whoa!” And the wagon presently came to a spiritless standstill.
    A woman slipped down the steps leading from a great porch; delirious white wings sucked round the yellow globe of a kerosene lantern that she carried high. But Joel, scowling at a dream demon, was unaware when the woman bent so intently towards him and peered into his face by the lamp’s smoky light.

TWO
    Falling . . . Falling . . . FALLING! a knifelike shaft, an underground corridor, and he was spinning like a fan blade through metal spirals; at the bottom a yawning-jawed crocodile followed his downward whirl with hooded eyes: as always, rescue came with wakefulness. The crocodile exploded in sunshine. Joel blinked and tasted his bitter tongue and did not move; the bed, an immense four-poster with different rosewood fruits carved crudely on its high headboard, was suffocatingly soft and his body had sunk deep in its feathery center. Although he’d slept naked, the light sheet covering him felt like a wool blanket.
    The whisper of a dress warned him that someone was in the room. And another sound,