The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks Read Free Book Online Page A

no small achievement.
    Tole slipped into the doctor’s backyard as quietly as he could. The gate had been left unlatched. There, under the eaves, the attic window looked out across the street, above a few low buildings, and unobstructed into the square.
    He quietly stowed his kindling carrier under the hedge, pulled out the rifle in its cloth, and moved quickly across the yard to the back door. It was unlocked, these being overly trusting people. He walked quietly down a narrow central hallway, which was broken by only one doorway. He guessed, correctly, that this was the door to the attic. He went through and up.
    Hanging from one of the beams of the attic was a collection of men’s hats, bowlers and slouch hats, tall stovepipes hardly ever worn. In one corner stood a dressmaker’s dummy, a headless and legless curve of a monstrous half-woman.
    He had no attic in his shack down in the Bucket. His neighbors painted their houses awful bright colors and were always tap-tap-tapping at the roof and the walls with their hammers, like they were all hell-bent on building up their own creation. He lived surrounded by a crowd of manic colored doers and builders, cobblers and carpenters. They tolerated him well enough for an outsider. He tolerated them well enough for a lot of folks who couldn’t leave well enough alone.
    Every once in a while he checked the crowd that had begun to gather in the square. What he was about to do, he’d been told, would be a great service. We’ll see about that . Tole unlatched the attic window and pushed it open. Wind and voices blew in with the late morning sun. He unwrapped ol’ GT from the blanket, raised the butt against his shoulder, sat down cross-legged with his elbows on his knees, and looked through the rear sight and stared at the front sight. He lowered the rifle, adjusted his position until he was aligned with the podium set up in the courthouse square. He breathed in deep and sighted in again.
    Across the way, in the square, men gathered, buzzing like ants. Two crowds, really, the Colored League men hard by the stage and the Conservatives across the street, standing on the corner, under cover of a shop’s front wall, facing the square. The crowd by the stage was almost all Negroes, former slaves now freedmen with their drums held close to their chests and banners clasped in some of their hands.
    One skinny black man held his banner out toward the crowd at the corner like a dare: The Radicals Build School Houses—The Conservatives Burn Them .
    Another, right at the head of the crowd, proudly held an American flag. Tole thought of the Union boys carrying the stars and stripes into battle, how the other boys had rallied around it, eyes raised to watch it wave. He remembered, too, how many of those Union boys later lay bleeding on the ground with that flag at their sides.
    There weren’t as many Conservatives at the corner—no more than thirty overall—but they all had a similar look to them. All those hard white faces. Pistols clipped to their belts or strapped to their chests. A smattering of Negroes stood among them. Always somebody to disagree , Tole thought.
    As the time for the speeches got closer, he could tell that words were being lobbed between the groups, thrown like stones into separate pools, but he was too far away to hear what they said.
    The men at the corner bristled as the speakers filed onto the stage. Tole thought he recognized one of them, high up above the crowd. He wasn’t sure at first—the angle and the hat obscured the man’s face—but once he turned, he knew for sure it was him: his neighbor, Theopolis Reddick. The cobbler. Tole wasn’t sure why Theopolis was there. He assumed he would speak. Tole himself was never one for great oratory and had respect for any man who did, especially young Negroes, many of whom were taking advantage of the new opportunities opening up to them—becoming politicians, business owners, and who knew what other