The Dead Don't Dance by Charles Martin Read Free Book Online

found a sick joy in tearing others’ apart. Maybe I could do better, I hoped. Maybe I could teach Nanny’s wonder through Papa’s pocketknife practicality and shield the students from the poisonous cynicism around me.
    I accepted an adjunct position at my university, teaching freshman and sophomore English. I enjoyed the classroom and the interaction with the students and even helped click on a few lightbulbs myself. All I wanted to do was introduce other people to the power and wonder of language. But all the covert backstabbing and infighting along the tortuous path to tenure drove me to the brink of drinking. If the pen is mightier than the sword, it’s also a good bit bloodier. Instead of finding Nanny’s fireside wonder shared amid my colleagues, I found ivory-tower experts ripe with stoic discontent and bent on tearing down castles they could never rebuild, simply for the sake of saying something.
    While I struggled to help kids look for universal truths and themes that great stories revealed in unforgettable ways—themes like love, humor, hope, and forgiveness—and maybe encourage them to transpose those through their fingers and onto paper, my colleagues stood on soapboxes with raised brows and asked, “Maybe, but what is hidden?” They reminded me of pharmacists who crushed their pills into powder and studied the contents under a microscope while never bothering to swallow the medicine.
    Caught in a postmodern pinball machine, I became pretty well disillusioned. I never voiced it to Maggie, but she could read me. She knew. After graduation, she gave me a good talking to. So I swallowed my disgust and filled out twenty applications for schools scattered about the South. I licked the stamps, dropped them in the box, and hoped the grass grew greener in some other pasture. When the last “we’re-sorry- to-inform-you-letter” arrived from my own hometown junior college, we quit our jobs, packed up my books, and came back here.
    Virginia is pretty, but it can’t hold a candle to South Carolina. We hadn’t even walked in the front door when I realized that my love for farming had much deeper roots than the shallow shoots I’d put down in academia. As I looked out over those fields where I had passed many a happy day, I knew I’d miss the students, the lively exchange of ideas, and the sight of lightbulbs turning on, but little else. I was glad to be home.
    The well water smelled like eggs, the faucets dripped like Chinese water torture, and both toilets ran constantly, but Maggie never complained. She loved the narrow, coal-burning fireplace, the front and back porches, and the two swinging screen doors that slammed too loudly and squeaked in spite of oil. But her two favorite pleasures were the tin roof beneath a gentle rain and Nanny’s breeze.
    I had never measured it, but including the porches, the house probably covered twelve hundred square feet. But it was ours, and for sixty-two years, love had lived here.
    Like riding a bicycle after the training wheels had been removed, I hopped on the tractor, sniffed the air for any hint of rain, and cried like a baby all the way to the river. Papa had taught me well, and once away from the classroom cobwebs and textbook chains, I remembered how to farm. In our first year, I sold the pine straw from beneath our fifteen hundred acres of planted pines, leased two five-hundred-acre blocks to part-time farmers who lived in Walterboro, and drilled soybean seed into the remaining five hundred acres of our thirty-five-hundred- acre tract. By the end of that year, we had made money.
    Maggie looked at Papa’s picture on the mantel, stroked the skin around my eyes, and said, “You two have the same wrinkles.” And that was okay with me. I liked watching things grow.
    It was shortly thereafter that Maggie tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go swimming.” I remember lying on the riverbank,