Stories of Erskine Caldwell by Erskine Caldwell Read Free Book Online Page B

promise I won’t.”
    “It’s all right now,” she smiled painfully. “It still hurts a little though.”
    Her head fell on my shoulder. I put my arms around her. She wiped the tears from her eyes.
    “It’s all right now,” she repeated. “It will stop hurting soon.”
    She lifted her head and smiled at me. Her large round blue eyes were the shade of the sky when the sun has begun to rise.
    “I’ll never strawberry-slap you again as long as I live, Fanny,” I pleaded, hoping she would forgive me.
    Fanny unbuttoned the dress down to her waist. The berry was mashed beneath her underclothes. The scarlet stain looked like a morning-glory against the white cloth.
    “I’ll have to unfasten this too, to get the berry out,” she said.
    “Let me get it,” I urged. “You don’t want the juice all over your fingers.”
    She unfastened the undergarment. The berry lay crushed between her breasts. They were milk-white and the center of each was stained like a mashed strawberry. Hardly knowing what I was doing I hugged her tightly in my arms and kissed her lips for a long time. The crushed strawberry fell to the ground beside us.
    When we got up, the sun was setting and the earth was becoming cool. We found our boxes and baskets of berries and walked across the fields to the barn. When we got there, Mr. Gunby counted them and paid us the money we had earned.
    We went through the barnyard to the front of the house and stood at the gate looking at each other for several minutes. Neither of us said anything. Fanny had once said she had never had a sweetheart. I wish she had been mine.
    Fanny turned and went down the road in one direction and I went up the road in another. It was the end of the strawberry season.
    (First published in Pagany )

Maud Island
    U NCLE M ARVIN WAS worried. He got up from the log and walked toward the river.
    “I don’t like the looks of it, boys,” he said, whipping off his hat and wiping his forehead.
    The houseboat was drifting downstream at about three miles an hour, and a man in a straw hat and sleeveless undershirt was trying to pole it inshore. The man was wearing cotton pants that had faded from dark brown to light tan.
    “It looks bad,” Uncle Marvin said, turning to Jim and me. “I don’t like the looks of it one whit.”
    “Maybe they are lost, Uncle Marvin,” Jim said. “Maybe they’ll just stop to find out where they are, and then go on away again.”
    “I don’t believe it, son,” he said, shaking his head and wiping the perspiration from his face. “It looks downright bad to me. That kind of a houseboat never has been out for no good since I can remember.”
    On a short clothesline that stretched along the starboard side, six or seven pieces of clothing hung waving in the breeze.
    “It looks awful bad, son,” he said again, looking down at me. We walked across the mud flat to the river and waited to see what the houseboat was going to do. Uncle Marvin took out his plug and cut off a chew of tobacco with his jackknife. The boat was swinging inshore, and the man with the pole was trying to beach it before the current cut in and carried them back to mid-channel. There was a power launch lying on its side near the stern, and on the launch was a towline that had been used for upstream going.
    When the houseboat was two or three lengths from the shore, Uncle Marvin shouted at the man poling it.
    “What’s your name, and what do you want here?” he said gruffly, trying to scare the man away from the island.
    Instead of answering, the man tossed a rope to us. Jim picked it up and started pulling, but Uncle Marvin told him to drop it. Jim dropped it, and the middle of the rope sank into the yellow water.
    “What did you throw my rope in for?” the man on the houseboat shouted. ‘What’s the matter with you?”
    Uncle Marvin spat some tobacco juice and glared right back at him. The houseboat was ready to run on the beach.
    “My name’s Graham,” the man said.