Mrs. God Read Online Free Page B

directly behind the little stone tooth. He might just now have jumped up out of the earth. His loose baggy brown trousers, spattered boots, and rumpled mackintosh were nearly the color of the landscape. He wore a dark cap pulled low on his forehead. The man slouched and grinned at Standish. He was missing most of his teeth.
    â€œI don’t really know,” Standish said.
    â€œIs that right?” said the grinning man. His tongue licked the spaces between his teeth.
    â€œI mean, I’m trying to figure it out,” Standish said. “I thought this marker might help me.”
    â€œAnd does it?” The man’s voice was a sly quiet burr, remarkably insinuating. “There’s precise matter to be read here. A man might do a great deal with information as accurate as that.”
    Standish hated the man’s dry, insulting mockery. “Well, it doesn’t do me any good. I thought I was on the motorway, going toward Huckstall.”
    â€œHuckstall.” The man pondered it. “Never heard of Americans making their way to Huckstall.”
    â€œI’m not really going to Huckstall,” Standish said, infuriated at having to explain himself. “I just thought I might have lunch there. I was going to pick up the road to Lincolnshire.”
    â€œLincolnshire, is it? You’ll want to do a good bit of driving. And you thought you were on the motorway. Is this how motorways look in America, then?”
    â€œWhere is the motorway?” Standish cried.
    â€œKill a bird? Little baby?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWith your car?” He pointed his chin toward the smear on the windshield.
    â€œYou’re crazy,” Standish said, though he had feared exactly this.
    The man blinked and stepped backward. His tongue slid into one of the spaces between his teeth. Now he seemed uncertain and defensive instead of insolent. He was crazy, after all—Standish had been too startled to see it.
    â€œWhere are you from?” he asked, hoping that the man would answer: Huckstall.
    The man tilted his head back over his shoulder, indicating wide empty blankness. Then he took another backward step, as if he feared that Standish might try to capture him. The stranger came into focus for Standish: he was not at all the ironic, almost menacing figure he had seemed. The fellow was deficient, probably retarded. He lived in that empty wilderness and he slept in his clothes. Now that he was no longer afraid of the man, Standish could pity him.
    â€œKilled something, that’ll do you,” the man said. His eyes gleamed like a dog’s, and he edged a bit further away. “That’ll be bad luck, that will.”
    Standish thought the bad luck was in meeting an oaf straight out of Thomas Hardy. “Where is Huckstall, would you know?”
    â€œI would. That I would. Yes.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd where is it?” Standish shouted.
    â€œUp there, up there, right up that road, which is the very road you’re on.”
    Standish sighed.
    â€œThey flee from me,” the man said.
    Standish put his hands in his pockets and began to move around the front of the car without quite turning his back on the vagrant.
    â€œThat sometime did me seek,” the man said. “With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.”
    Standish stopped moving, aware that he was, after all, in England. No addled American tramp would quote Thomas Wyatt at you. The English teacher in him was piqued and delighted. “Go on,” he said.
    â€œI have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not once remember, That sometime …” He paused, then intoned, “ Timor mortis conturbat me ,” quoting from another poem. Evidently he was a ragbag of disconnected phrases.
    â€œHah! Very good,” Standish said, smiling. “Excellent. You’ve been very helpful to me. Thank you.”
    The man closed his eyes and began to chant.