Rock Island Line David Rhodes (ereader iphone .txt) 📖

Then they went downstairs so July could look at the kitchen and Mal saw how Mrs. Frunt lived there. She’d built her world in the kitchen. Not one thing was out of place. The floor was spotlessly clean and shining, a special bracket for each set of utensils hanging on the wall, a dark walnut shelf reserved for cookbooks, braided hot pads, a neat row of little spice jars, the stove and oven immaculate and gleaming. The light blue curtains were pulled back and tied with a delicate white cord. Plants bloomed on the sill, carefully pruned and dusted. There was one wet spot on the countertop where Perry had opened a quart from the refrigerator, but generally, as you could tell, he respected this refuge—and she held to it with the passion of a saint. He’d put the opener away.

“Make yourselves to home,” said Perry. “If there’s something in the refrigerator that strikes you, just go ahead and take it. We don’t have much, what with the little Becky can make and what I scrape together God knows how, and the price of even the most meager foods—though I suppose we wouldn’t know what to do if we had better. When you have so little esteem for yourself I guess it doesn’t really matter; bread and coffee are good enough forthe likes of me. But if you can find anything, you’re welcome to what we have.”

July was staring out the kitchen window. “See what’s in there,” he said to Mal.

She came over to him and whispered: “You see what’s in there. I’ll have a sandwich and potato salad if you can find it.”

“That would be good,” whispered July and they gave a short muffled laugh.

Perry smiled, though nothing in his face, even his eyes, showed good will. They sat at the chrome-and-formica table with their half-drunk root beers and waited for Becky to come home. Perry pulled up a chair beside them and lit a cigar he’d taken from the pocket of his pants which he’d already been chewing on earlier that day. The television was still playing in the other room.

“Things haven’t been easy,” whined Perry. “I guess it’s no use my telling you, for maybe you’ve been in a position to know yourself. Why, trying to get someone to run that nice little place of your grandfolks—not more’n thirty acres it is, and what these cheatin’ farmers have to have to plant a few seeds once a year’s enough to scare a person. Why, the taxes alone, not to mention the upkeep. Have you got any idea what the taxes were on this place when you left?” and he pressed his insistent gray eyes toward July and Mal (who was exactly across from him—as far away as she could be).

July shook his head.

“Well, I’d wondered. When you run off I wondered. Your poor aunt and I nearly died from worry. Why, she even called the police! But I wondered when I learned that the burden was likely to fall on me to try and take care of this place—there bein’ no more responsibility in this world than you can shake a stick at, it came upon me to look into what the taxes were and I had a thought then that maybe you’d run away to get out from under this terrible burden of the taxes. Oh, they were terrific. Higher’n I’d ever seen before. But I took it on me that we’d stay and try to hold on to the place. And do you know, them blasted crooks at thetax bureau has more’n doubled the taxes—doubled ’em! Why, it’s unbelievable. So while you was off carryin’ on in—where’d you say?—Philadelphia, one of the finer cities in the East, and maybe you had a rough lot of it and maybe you didn’t, that ain’t for me to know; it was my lot to be here, scratchin’ and savin’ and trying to keep the place from going back to the state. Do you know how much we’ve paid?” He did some invisible calculations on the top of the table, moving the end of his finger around like a pencil stub. “It comes to a little over, for the two places, a little over fifteen thousand, closer to sixteen thousand.”

“That seems like quite a bit,” said July.

“Well, I would hope to shout it does. Course I’ve got to admit I had my hopes—foolish things, ain’t they, hopes?” He addressed this to Mal, pointing the mouth end of his cigar, and she curled up inside herself with a little external shiver. “Your aunt and I, heart-sick and poor as we are, we always hoped against hope, you might say, that someday you’d be back safe and sound and in good health, which I can see you are. Ah! To be young again. An’ though I’d tell her that it wasn’t to no end, frettin’ and carryin’ on, her comfortin’ me and me comfortin’ her, takin’ turns, so to say, still she thought that maybe, even above all else, that maybe if and when that great day were to come, and thank God that it has, that there might be some small reward for the caretakers . . . a reimbursement, so to say . . . what was rightfully owed to us.” And with that he turned one of his piercing eyes on July, who, though he had followed most of what he’d been saying, had some time back been distracted by the view out the back door toward the horizon.

Finding Perry had stopped talking and was looking intently at him as though he should respond, he said, “Well, good, good,” and looked uncomfortably at his folded hands in his lap.

Frunt murmured something and went off into the living room.

“He said he wants you to pay him sixteen thousand dollars,” whispered Mal.

“No he doesn’t. You must have misunderstood him.”

“He does. He thinks you owe