All Flesh Is Grass Read Online Free Page A

especially with me. He loved flowers and he’d hung around the greenhouse that my father had, and my father, who was constitutionally unable to be unkind to anyone, had put up with him and his continual jabber. Tupper had attached himself to me and no matter what I did or said, he’d tag along behind me. The fact that he was a good ten years older than I was made no difference at all; in his own mind Tupper never had outgrown childhood. In the back of my mind I still could hear his jaunty voice, mindlessly happy over anything at all, cooing over flowers or asking endless, senseless questions. I had hated him, of course, but there was really nothing one could pin a good hate on. Tupper was just something that one had to tolerate. But I knew that I never would forget that jaunty, happy voice, or his drooling as he talked, or the habit that he had of counting on his fingers—God knows why he did it—as if he were in continual fear that he might have lost one of them in the last few minutes.
    The sun had come up by now and the world was flooded with a brilliant light, and I was becoming more certain by the minute that the village was encircled and cut off, that someone or something, for no apparent reason, had dropped a cage around us. Looking back along the way that I had come, I could see that I’d been traveling on the inside of a curve. Looking ahead, the curve wasn’t difficult to plot.
    And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A town that was no different from ten thousand other towns.
    Although, I told myself, that might not be entirely true. It was exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that is, except for Nancy Sherwood—Nancy, who only the night before had told me her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set apart from all other little towns?
    Just ahead was my home street and my calculations told me that it was located just inside the encircling barricade.
    There was, I told myself, no sense in going further. It would be a waste of time. I did not need to complete the circle to convince myself that we were hemmed in.
    I cut across the backyard of the Presbyterian parsonage and there, just across the street, was my house, set within its wilderness of flowers and shrubs, with the abandoned greenhouse standing in the back and the old garden around it, a field of purple flowers, those same purple flowers that Mrs. Tyler had poked at with her cane and said were doing well this season.
    I heard the steady squeaking as I reached the street and I knew that some kids had sneaked into the yard and were playing in the old lawn swing that stood beside the porch.
    I hurried up the street, a little wrathful at the squeaking. I had told those kids, time and time again, to leave that swing alone. It was old and rickety and one of these days one of the uprights or something else would break, and one of the kids might be badly hurt. I could have taken it down, of course, but I was reluctant to, for it was Mother’s swing. She had spent many hours out in the yard, swinging gently and sedately, looking at the flowers.
    The yard was closed in by the old-time lilac hedge and I couldn’t see the swing until I reached the gate.
    I hurried for the gate and jerked it open savagely and took two quick steps through it, then stopped in my tracks.
    There were no kids in the swing. There was a man, and except for a battered hat of straw set squarely atop his head, he was as naked as a jaybird.
    He saw me and grinned a foolish grin. “Hi, there,” he said, with jaunty happiness. And even as he said it, he began a counting of his fingers, drooling as he counted.
    And at the sight of him, at the sound of that remembered but long forgotten voice, my mind went thudding back to the afternoon before.

2
    Ed Adler had come that afternoon to take out the