The Slow Moon by Elizabeth Cox Read Free Book Online Page B

her. She didn’t feel anything, though he made sounds as if he enjoyed what he was doing. She tried to beg him to stop when someone jerked her head and cut her neck against a rock. When the last one pressed himself against her, he put his head next to hers and whispered words she didn’t understand. She felt stickiness between her legs. She was stinging and something deeper inside felt ripped.
    This last one had long hair that fell in her face. She could feel its heaviness even through the shirt that smothered her—strings on her forehead and cheeks. She tried to get up. She tried to lift herself, but he knocked her down. Then he went in, tearing her more. She kicked, but any movement hurt, so again she lay still. Then gratefully she went unconscious.
    Sophie woke finally, completely, hours later in the hospital room. Just before she woke she felt her mother’s hands bathing her arms and legs with a soft, soapy rag. She heard the nurse, Louise Burden, speaking.
    “Has she said anything yet?” Louise asked.
    “No,” said Rita.
    Louise, the head nurse at the Marion County Hospital emergency room, had treated most of the white kids in town. She knew them as well as she knew the blacks. Louise had always been friendly to white people. She nursed their children through strep throat, broken arms, pinkeye, stomach pains, influenza. And as they grew older she helped them through alcohol abuse and what she called “frying their brains with drugs.”
    “You think this was somebody she knows?” Louise asked.
    Rita couldn’t answer. She’d been sitting at her daughter’s side for hours. She hadn’t eaten or slept. She shivered involuntarily, then saw Sophie’s eyes open.
    “Shhh,” Rita said. She stood, leaning. Louise and Rita both leaned, as if they were looking into a deep hole.
    Sophie could not discern their words, but their faces hung like fruit, like something able to nourish. She closed her eyes and began to tremble, every nerve and vessel shivering.
    “She’s back in the world,” said Louise, placing two fingers on the pulse at her wrist. “If she’s trembling, she’s back in this world.”

Eight
    E. G. H OLLIS, a tall man, thick and uneven like a tree trunk, stood in the kitchen stirring some soup when he heard knocking at the front door. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and a visitor after dark usually meant bad news. Hollis, a teacher in the local high school, had already heard the news, and it was bad. He knew all the students and had taught them, or would teach them, American and European history. He leaned his large head to look out the window and saw Charlie Post’s truck parked under the pecan tree. Charlie liked to have pecans fall into the truck and would even shake the tree to make them fall into the bed.
    “You could just ask me for a bag of pecans, you know,” Hollis once told Charlie.
    But Charlie shook his head. “It’s better this way.”
    Hollis opened the door and motioned Charlie in. “Want to have some soup with me?”
    Charlie wiped his hiking boots on the mat and stepped inside. “What’d you make?”
    “Beef vegetable.”
    “Sure.”
    The two men took bowls and spoons and bread to the kitchen table. After tasting it to see if it was seasoned well enough, Hollis ladled the soup into two bowls and put a spoon into each one. A big man with wide shoulders, Charlie sat gingerly on a kitchen chair. The chair let out a creak as Charlie edged it closer to the table.
    “Raining hard?” Hollis asked. Water dripped from Charlie’s cap and drops hung from his chin.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Might hail.” He spooned soup into his mouth. He and Hollis had been friends for nearly eighteen years. They had coached Little League for ten years. The boys still called Charlie “Coach.”
    “Did you hear about Sophie Chabot?” Charlie asked. “And that Crow Davenport’s been charged?”
    “Yes.”
    “What do you think?”
    Hollis’s fingers drifted to his scalp. He had grown slightly