Джон Гришэм - A Painted House

Hank’s departure was confirmed at some point during the day. Over supper my father said that Mr. Spruill had told him that Hank had left during the night. He was hitchhiking back to their home in Eureka Springs.

Hank was floating at the bottom of the St. Francis River, and when I thought about him down there with the channel catfish, I lost my appetite. The adults were watching me closer than usual. During the past twenty-four hours I’d fainted, had nightmares, cried several times, and, as far as they knew, gone for a long walk in my sleep. Something was wrong with me, and they were concerned.

“Wonder if he’ll make it home,” Gran said. This launched a round of stories about folks who’d disappeared. Pappy had a cousin who had been migrating with his family from Mississippi to Arkansas. They were traveling in two old trucks. They came to a railroad crossing. The first truck, the one driven by the cousin in question, crossed first. A train came roaring by, and the second truck waited for it to pass. It was a long train, and when it finally cleared, there was no sign of the first truck on the other side. The second truck crossed and came to a fork in the road. The cousin was never seen again, and that had been thirty years ago. No sign of him or the truck.

I’d heard this story many times. I knew Gran would go next, and sure enough, she told the tale about her mother’s father, a man who’d sired six kids then hopped on a train and fled to Texas. Someone in the family stumbled across him twenty years later. He had another wife and six more kids.

“You okay, Luke?” Pappy said when the eating was over. All of his gruffness was gone. They were telling stories for my benefit, trying to amuse me because I had them worried.

“Just tired, Pappy,” I said.

“You want to go to bed early?” my mother asked, and I nodded.

I went to Ricky’s room while they washed the dishes. My letter to him was now two pages long, a monumental effort. It was still in my writing tablet, hidden under the mattress, and it covered most of the Latcher conflict. I read it again and was quite pleased with myself. I toyed with the idea of telling Ricky about Cowboy and Hank, but decided to wait until he came home. By then the Mexicans would be gone, things would be safe again, and Ricky would know what to do.

I decided that the letter was ready to be mailed, then started worrying about how I might accomplish mailing it. We always sent our letters at the same time, often in the same large manila envelope. I decided that I’d consult with Mr. Lynch Thornton at the post office on Main Street.

My mother read me the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, one of my favorites. Once the weather broke and the nights became cool, we spent less time on the porch and more time reading before bed. My mother and I read, the others did not. She preferred Bible stories, and this suited me fine. She would read awhile, then explain things. Then read some more. There was a lesson in every story, and she made sure I understood each one. Nothing irritated me more than for Brother Akers to screw up the details in one of his long-winded sermons.

When I was ready for bed, I asked her if she would stay there, in Ricky’s bed with me, until I fell asleep.

“Of course I will,” she said.

After a day of rest, there was no way my father would tolerate further absence from the fields. He pulled me out of bed at five, and we went about our routine chores of gathering eggs and milk.

I knew I couldn’t continue to hide in the house with my mother, so I bravely went through the motions of getting ready to pick cotton. I’d have to face Cowboy at some point before he left. It was best to get it over with and to do it with plenty of folks around.

The Mexicans were walking to the fields, skipping the morning ride on the flatbed trailer. They could start picking a few minutes earlier, plus it kept them away from the Spruills. We left the house just before dawn. I held firm to Pappy’s seat on the tractor and watched my mother’s face slowly disappear in the kitchen window. I’d prayed long and hard the night before, and something told me she would be safe.

As we made our way along the field road, I studied the John Deere tractor. I’d spent hours on it, plowing, disking, planting, even hauling cotton to town with my father or Pappy, and its operation had always seemed sufficiently complex and challenging. Now, after thirty minutes on the road grader, with its puzzling array of levers and pedals, the tractor seemed quite simple. Pappy just sat there, hands on the wheel, feet still, half-asleep — while Otis had been a study in constant motion — another reason why I should grade roads and not farm if, of course, the baseball career did not work out, a most unlikely event.

The Mexicans were already half a row down, lost in the cotton and oblivious to our arrival. I knew Cowboy was with them, but in the early light I couldn’t tell one Mexican from the other.

I avoided him until we broke for lunch. Evidently he’d seen me during the morning, and I guess he figured a little reminder would be appropriate. While the rest of his pals ate leftovers under the shade of the cotton trailer, Cowboy rode in with us. He sat alone on one side of the flatbed, and I ignored him until we were almost to the house.

When I finally mustered the courage to look at him, he was cleaning his fingernails with his switchblade, and he was waiting for me. He smiled — a wicked grin that conveyed a thousand words — and he gently waved the knife at me. No one else saw it, and I looked away immediately.

Our agreement had just been solidified even further.

By late afternoon the cotton trailer was full. After a quick dinner Pappy announced that he and I would haul it to town. We went to the fields and hooked it to the truck, then left the farm on our newly graded road. Otis was quite a craftsman. The road was smooth, even in Pappy’s old truck.

As usual, Pappy said nothing as he drove, and this was fine with me because I also had nothing to say. Lots of secrets but no way to unload them. We crossed the bridge slowly, and I scanned the thick, slow waters below but saw nothing out of the ordinary — no sign of blood or of the crime I’d witnessed.

More than a full day had passed since the killing, a normal day of work and drudgery on the farm. I thought about the secret with every breath, but I was masking it well, I thought. My mother was safe, and that was all that mattered.

We passed the road to the Latchers’, and Pappy glanced their way. For the moment, they were just a minor nuisance.

On the highway, farther away from the farm, I began to think that one day soon I might be able to unload my burden. I could tell Pappy, alone, just the two of us. Before long Cowboy would be back in Mexico, safe in that foreign world. The Spruills would return home, and Hank wouldn’t be there. I could tell Pappy, and he would know what to do.

We entered Black Oak behind another trailer and followed it to the gin. When we parked I scrambled out and stuck close to Pappy’s side. Some farmers were huddled just outside the gin office, and a serious discussion had been under way for a while. We walked up on them and listened.

The news was somber and threatening. The night before, heavy rains had hit Clay County, north of us. Some places reported six inches in ten hours. Clay County was upstream on the St. Francis. The creeks and streams were flooded up there and pouring into the river.

The water was rising.

There was a debate as to whether this would affect us. The minority opinion was that the storm would have little impact on the river near Black Oak. We were too far away and, absent more rains, a small rise in the St. Francis wouldn’t flood anything. But the majority view was far more pessimistic, and since the bulk of them were professional worriers anyway, the news was accepted with great concern.