Go as a River by Shelley Read EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Shelley Read
- Language: English
- Genre: Small Town & Rural Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
1948
He wasn’t much to look at.
Not at first, anyway.
“Pardon,” the young man said, a grimy thumb and forefinger tugging at
the brim of his tattered red ball cap. “This the way to the flop?”
As simple as that. This ordinary question from a filthy stranger walking
up Main Street just as I arrived at the intersection with North Laura.
His overalls and hands were blackened with coal, which I assumed was
axle grease or layers of dirt from the fields, though it was too dark for
either. His cheeks were smudged. Tan skin shone through trickled sweat.
Straight black hair jutted from beneath his cap.
The autumn day had begun as ordinary as the porridge and fried eggs I
had served the men for breakfast. I noticed nothing uncommon as I went on
to tend the house and the docile animals in their pens, picked two baskets of
late-season peaches in the cool morning air, and made my daily deliveries
pulling the rickety wagon behind my bicycle, then returned home to cook
lunch. But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the
ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.
“The way to everything,” I replied.
I was not trying to be witty or catch his notice, but the angle of his
pause and slight twist of smile showed that my response amused him. He
made my insides leap, looking at me that way.
“Real small town, I mean.” I tried to set things straight, to clarify that I
was not the type of girl that boys noticed or paused to smirk at on a street
corner.
The stranger’s eyes were as dark and shiny as a raven’s wing. And kind
—that is what I remember most about those eyes from that first glimpse
until the final gaze—a gentleness that seemed to fountain from his center
and spill out like an overflowing well. He studied me a moment, still
grinning, then pulled again at his cap brim and continued walking toward
Dunlap’s boarding house near the end of Main.
It was true that this one crumbling sidewalk led to everything. Along
with Dunlap’s, we had the Iola Hotel for fancy folks and the tavern tacked
on the back for drinking folks; Jernigan’s Standard station, hardware, and
post; the café that always smelled of coffee and bacon; and Chapman’s Big
Little Store, with groceries and a deli counter and too much gossip. At the
west end of it all stood the tall flagpole between the schoolhouse I once
attended and the white clapboard church where our family used to sit,
polished and proper, every Sunday when Mother was alive. Beyond that,
Main Street dove abruptly into the hillside like a period after a short
sentence.
I was heading in the same direction as the stranger—to drag my brother
out of the poker cabin behind Jernigan’s—but I wasn’t about to walk right
on this boy’s heels. I paused there at the corner and shielded my eyes from
the afternoon sun to study him as he continued on. He strolled slowly,
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