Dirty Work Read Online Free Page A

my leg, arm, whatever it was, you can have that horse. Well the old Doc decided he might could save it then. What I’d love to seen after he got through fixing old Jimmy Stewart’s arm was about four corporals come in there and get him and march him out to a wall and shoot the sumbitch full of holes. But old Jimmy never did write home again and his mama thought he was dead and finally President Lincoln got him in his office and told him he’d better write his mama if he knew what was good for him. Bunch of years later they (after they got happily reunited) found his old horse pulling a coal wagon in Kansas City or somewhere and bought him back for like five bucks. They was gonna keep him in a warm barn and all for the rest of his life. It was a real heartwarming story. It was a happily ever after.
    What you got to do is stay up late at night and check your
TV Guide
for this good stuff. You’ll maybe see it once in the next fifty years. I done seen it. Just can’t remember the name of it.
    But me and Mama had a good time that night, watching that movie. We was cooking us some popcorn in between times. She’d run in there and turn the burner on and run back in and set down and I’d run in there and put the popcorn on and she’d run in there and shake it and run back and then I’d run in there and shake it and that way didn’t neither of us miss much. And we had butter. REAL butter. Not this fake shit now. My mama still had a churn between her legs every morning.
    But it come time to go. That morning it did. She fixedme some coffee, I was smoking for the first time in front of her. She didn’t see me leave from Memphis. She just saw me leave from Clarksdale. Cotton was up. Most of them around us had a pretty good stand. Looked like they’s gonna make it good that year. I felt better, finally, looking at it, knowing I wasn’t going to have to chop no more of the shit. My little sister was standing out there with us. Old boys I knew from Tunica was taking me to Memphis. They was all out there in the car waiting. One of them times, you know. I didn’t have to report until the next morning. We was going to Beale Street that night. But there my mama and them having to tell me goodbye. And what a thing for her, me having to go off to something like that. Ain’t no words to say, except the ones everybody thinking about but just don’t want to say. Don’t die.
    What you gonna tell em? You can’t do nothing but kiss em and hope they right.
    I wish they’d put that other movie back on, that one I seen that time. One where that guy had all his arms and legs blowed off and his face too. That guy talked to Jesus a couple of times. I don’t think Jesus ever come and set on his bed like He does mine, though.

I was thinking about Thomas Gandy. He was a little kid who lived right down the road from us when I was a little kid. It was right after they sent my daddy to the pen.
    You ever tried to remember the earliest thing you could remember? I mean when you were little and what you were doing? I have. For a long time the earliest thing I could remember was riding on a wagonload of cotton with some little black kids and jumping around in it. But I got hypnotized one day by this girl who was going to school over at Ole Miss and after I came to I got to remembering some stuff that was even earlier than that. It was a longtime ago. I saw a man get killed. Well, I didn’t really see it. I just saw him after he got killed.
    Nobody’s ever talked about it to me. Not even my mother. Some things people just don’t talk about.
    In my mind I put myself about four. Maybe I was five. I don’t know. I know Max wasn’t born yet.
    The thing I remember most is the man lying there in a big pool of blood. It was black. Like he was stuck in the middle of a great big scab that was growing on the ground. I remember us on the porch, just sitting there, looking at him. I know I kept asking Mama something, over and over. I guess it was because I