Love and Sleep Read Online Free Page A

then a politician, then a speculator in coal leases, then a bankrupt, then a suicide) had two distinct parts: a big, square two-story place of dingy clapboard with a pillared front porch, and a low bungalow of four rooms in a row, connected to the big house by a trellised breezeway. Bird told Pierce that the little house had been built as a gift for the Hazeltons’ only daughter and her husband, so that she wouldn't leave home, a motive that Pierce could not then credit. Bird had the first of the four rooms for herself, and Hildy the second; the third was the daughter's kitchen, and the fourth a tiny windowed sitting-room or sun-porch where an old couch moldered.
    Upstairs in the big house Sam and Opal Boyd had had their bedroom, and a small connecting room was Warren's. Joe Boyd had another to himself, and a fourth was empty. That was the one Winnie took. Into it went her marble-topped dresser, and atop the dresser the silver-backed brushes and mirror she never actually used, and the silver-framed photographs of her parents; into it too, borne in somehow on these things, went an odor of Brooklyn and his infancy that Pierce could detect there even years later.
    Where was Pierce to go? The first plan was that he would share with Joe Boyd, but Joe Boyd set himself so adamantly against this that no one, not Sam, not Winnie, not Pierce certainly, wanted to try converting him. So Hildy moved in with Bird, and Pierce took her room next to the kitchen of the bungalow. (When Joe Boyd at length left home, Pierce was offered his room in the big house next to Sam's; but he preferred his room in the girls’ wing. Hildy took it instead.)
    Sam had supposed that one thing he was providing for Pierce under his roof was a sort of older brother, someone who might counteract any bent that being his father's son might have left him with—no, that was too strongly put, Sam knew, but still he thought that Joe Boyd could be mentor, guide, friend for Pierce, all that Sam's own older brothers had been for him. Sam was sure enough of this that he paid less careful attention to Pierce than he might have. To Pierce, though, Joe Boyd with his sad, minatory eyes and jailbird haircut remained just what he had always seemed, the viceroy or dark archangel of Sam, the one who brought him Sam's wishes and instructions moral or practical, lessons Pierce could never learn.
    * * * *
    That spring Joe Boyd had organized his sisters and his brother into a club, with passwords and offices and swearings-in. Joe Boyd's club was called the Retrievers, in imitation of the animal lodges he had known of back North, Elks, Moose, Lions; his was named in honor of the breed of dog he most admired and would never own. The Retrievers had their headquarters in a long-disused chicken house up the steep hillside from the big house; its chief activity was the impossible job of cleaning this place of its accumulation of guano and pinfeathers and crushed eggshell: the job being done by the younger members at Joe Boyd's direction.
    Pierce, hands in his jacket pockets, stood at the door watching the distasteful work go on, never having seen or smelled such a place before. He hadn't been invited to be a Retriever by the only Retriever able to issue the invitation, Joe Boyd, and he couldn't bring himself to ask for admission either. He had come to realize, though, that he wouldn't be able to spend the rest of his childhood in his room, as he had opined to his mother he might; he'd have to come to accommodation.
    "Whatcha doing?"
    "What's it look like?"
    Shrug. He asked what anyway the place was, with its boxes of whitened screening and strawdusty air. Joe Boyd took exception to his superior tone, which Pierce hadn't intended.
    "Not good enough for you?"
    "Well we don't exactly have chicken houses in Brooklyn."
    "Yeah? Well."
    Without knowing where he was headed, Pierce allowed himself to be drawn into a debate with Joe Boyd about the relative merits of New York and Kentucky. It was