Had I a Hundred Mouths Read Online Free

moonlight I saw that Leander was striped and spotted like an animal. He limped because of his hurt leg some way, but he would never let me see what was the matter with it. His big eyes glared pure white, his hair was all coming back wild and long like a white man’s and twas of a reddish color like his bedeviled father’s. Who was this boy? Who could live like that, who would want to, you answer me that. And he never showed his feelings; no matter how many times I asked the question why would you do something like that, he would look at me with that terrible look as if he was asking, do what? When I finally held him up against the wall of the cave and said tell me, tell me why you would do something like that, and I almost told him about the red nigger his father and that he had done it to his own mother, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t do that, I guess I just loved Leander too much to kill his heart like that, if he had any of it left, and if any of his heart was left he was probably saving it for his mother and his father if ever he would find them. Anyway, when he didn’t say a word I finally realized that he couldn’t, that his voice must have been burnt out of his throat. Because when I finally held him by the throat he groaned a sound of ah-ah-ah and his breath smelled of old smoke of the Klu Klux Klan. Leander was burnt inside too. Poor lost nigger boy. So I just came and sat in the cave with him and drank my whiskey in the dark, as quiet as he was. This was when I give him back the red ring and he put it on his burnt finger.
    I begun some days to let Leander loose. He strayed from the cave more and more. I warned him not to, but he’d wander in the woods. I saw him begin to leap and to run, the way a cripple does—or a crippled animal. Because that’s what he would have looked like to any hunter if any had come out there, and they would have shot him dead. Once when I came and could not find him and I was afraid to call out his name, I looked and looked and finally found him by the log pond where the old kiln was and heavy trees that vines crawled up to the top of and then fell down, all blooming, morning glory and honeysuckle and muscadine vines, and trumpets; this was where I found Leander. I saw him sitting on the old walls of the kiln, looking into the pond. It was just at twilight. An owl begun to make its hurting sound. And I thought, who is this creature of the woods, borned in the woods and burnt in the woods and healed, and hiding in the woods from his persecutors and from all humanity? And at that time I was afraid for Leander and for myself, wondering what we would ever do. There was a road going to be built soon across the woods—that’s the Highway now, I-17—and I heard talk of some kind of a plant going to be started—which is now of course the Dye Works that turned the river yellow—and I was scared. And I said to Leander, you muss not ever do that again, run off from the cave that far. But Leander didn’t want to go on living hiding, I saw that, he wanted free, I could see that. And I knew that he had seen himself in the pond.
    But he went on. Leander went on living, continued the uncle. Why? You’d have thought he’d just hang himself from a tree or drown hisself in the log pond—many times I expected to come and find that he had done that, killed himself by his own hand. Like his mother did. But Leander stayed alive and kept living, don’t know why. And then one day when I came to the cave he was gone. I looked everywhere. I couldn’t call because I didn’t know who’d hear me. At first I run this way and then I run that way and then I was going around in circles. If even a branch of a tree cracked, I thought it was Leander. Then I got my bearings from the black piece of smokestack of the old sawmill that stuck up like a knife and I ran to the kiln and whispered Leander! I saw some birds that must have been his