Atticus Read Online Free Page B

used to mean his son to him, he could only smell whiskey and tobacco and the harsh incense of his shaman rites.
    Atticus turned up the kitchen radio so he could hear people give their hasty opinions on a nighttime phone-in show while he peeled a Washington apple at the stoop window and looked out toward the machine shed. Horizontal snow was flying through the halo of the green yard light and carrots of ice were hanging from the roof’s iron gutters. Atticus ate apple slices off the sharp blade of his paring knife. Without knowing why, he looked to the pantry, and just then a milk pitcher slipped off its hook and crashed onto the pantry floor.
    Hours after sunup Atticus carried a tin pail of hot water out to One Sock and Pepper, scooped oats into a pan, and then crouched quietly in a stall corner, looking up at the horses’ slow chewing. A sparrow flew in an upper window and got lost in the night of the barn, slashing among the high rafters and pigeon roosts and loudly rapping into a penthouse window before swooping low enough to veer out through the great door and rise up.
    Atticus petted One Sock along the withers and went outside to his snow-topped Ford pickup for his daily trip to the Antelope truck stop. And then he got the feeling that the house telephone was ringing. He argued with himself about whether he ought to go to it or no. The truck’s ignitionground like an auger in iron and the engine caught and Atticus gave it gas for half a minute, looking out at the yellow barn and silo and unhenned coop, Serena not putting eggs in her gray sweater pockets as the white chickens strutted away, Serena’s peacock not jerking its glare at the dog and making its glamorous tail display. Weather reports on the truck radio said the temperature was up to fifteen degrees, but his bare fingers were still pretty sore, so he got out and went back inside to get his yellow gloves.
    Atticus stopped by the house telephone and looked at it, and the telephone began ringing. He hesitated and then picked up the receiver and heard Renata Isaacs. She first reminded him of who she was. “I haven’t forgotten,” he said. She said she was calling from Resurrección. And then she talked to him about Scott. Atticus pulled over a spindle chair, and she explained the circumstances. She was trying not to cry. Atticus was sitting there, not saying anything he meant to, and wiping a porthole in the steamed windowpane with one yellow glove. The truck’s engine was running at high speed, and the smoke from the tailpipe was shaping gray people that a hard wind ripped away. She said how terrible she felt, she was as upset as he was, she hadn’t known his son was that depressed. Atticus accepted her sympathy and he wrote down her telephone number and then he lost himself until he heard her hang up on the other end. Atticus couldn’t get up without gripping the crosspiece on the spindle chair. He went out and switched off the truck’s ignition, and then he telephoned Frank in his Antelope office, giving him the news.
    *       *       *
    Upstairs in Scott’s room was a green wall shingled with high school and college paintings, all created in those happy times when everything that Scotty touched seemed to turn into a picture. Atticus stared at the portrait of himself as he was twenty years ago, forty-seven and finding wealth in oil, his hair and great mustache a chestnut brown, his blue eyes checkered by the stoop’s windowpanes, the April sunlight like buttermilk, just back from Mass in his blood-red tie and a hard-as-cardboard shirt that was so blazingly white it glowed. His son had titled the picture “Confidence.”
    Atticus sat at his son’s oak desk and pulled out a lower right-hand drawer jammed with manila folders upon which Scott had printed, in a fine draftsman’s style, Art Schools, Banking, Credit Cards, Fellowships and Grants, Medical, Taxes, and Vita.