Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas Read Free Book Online Page A

again about the Japanese girl at the depot and how she must have felt with people staring at her.
    “Glad you spoke up, Loyal,” Mr. Gardner said. “I couldn’t hire hands if I paid them ten dollars a day—even if I could afford ten dollars a day.”
    “That’s the truth,” Dad said. He and Mr. Gardner talked for a few minutes. Then Mr. Lee told Dad to come around to the drugstore on Sunday while Granny, Mom, and I were at church, and that he’d treat him to a chocolate soda. The others who’d spoken to Dad left, along with one or two of the government men, and I got nervous when I looked across the room at the people still standing around Mr. Spano. Susan Reddick’s father was among them, but Susan and her mother were still seated, both of them staring at the floor.
    Every now and then, one of the men with Mr. Spano turned to stare at us with narrowed eyes, as if they were talking about us. Some dope had drawn a cartoon in chalk on the blackboard of a Japanese man and underneath it was a misspelled caption: “Your a sap Mr. Jap.” One of the government men took a swipe at the picture with an eraser, leaving a swath through the face like a black-and-white rainbow.
    Dad and Mom and I went outside into a night that had turned cold, and Mom buttoned up her coat around her neck. “I sure could use that Persian lamb jacket you were going to buy me,” she said, trying to get Dad’s mind off the meeting. The two of them had joked as long as I could remember about Dad buying her a fur coat, but so far she’d never even had a fox-fur scarf.
    “I’m working on it,” Dad said, squeezing her hand, and I thought how nice it was that Mom and Dad liked each other.
    We got into Red Boy and Dad turned on the motor, and we started down the Tallgrass Road. Although it was dark, the sky was bright from the spotlights at the camp. I wondered what it would be like to be a Spano, which made me shiver. Being a Spano meant sharing a house with rats, sleeping in a bed without sheets, and eating antelope. The only thing worse was being a Jack. Either possibility was too horrible to contemplate.
    Mom had been thinking about the Spanos, too, because she said, “That Mr. Spano is mean enough to step on baby chicks.” That was the worst thing Mom could say about a person, since baby chicks were helpless, and Mom loved them almost as much as she loved Buddy, Marthalice, and me. If the weather was cold, she’d take the chicks inside, two dozen or more little balls of yellow fluff, and put them into a box next to the oil stove.
    "Oh, don’t worry about John Spano and them. They perform like a circus; they’re all show,” Dad said, patting Mom’s knee. He was silent until after we reached the turn into our farm. He slowed the truck, downshifted, and straddled a hole before coming to a stop. I got out and opened the gate; then Dad drove through and waited for me to latch the gate. Instead of getting back into the truck, I stood on the running board and put my hand through the window to hold on to the backseat, because I’d have to open the barn door. Our dogs, Snow White, the collie, and Sabra, the mutt, came out and barked, then ran along beside us. We heard a clucking from the henhouse, and Mom said she thought there might be a coyote somewhere about and that she ought to take down her shotgun. Mom loved most living things, but she hated a predator, and she’d kill one if she had to. She was a good shot, too. Dad kept a picture on the dresser of Mom that had been taken when she was a little girl. She was sitting on a chair in front of a quilt, with her dog and her gun. Dad said that pretty well summed up Mom.
    I leaned my head against the roof of the truck and heard Dad say, “It may not be a Spano, but I’m afraid somebody’s going to make trouble over this camp, Mother.”
    “You stay out of it, Loyal, and don’t embarrass me in front of my friends.”
    “What about you, Mary? You feel the same way I do about the