Summer of the Dead Read Online Free

happening to me, my girl,” he had said to her, back when it began. “In my head. Clouds. It’s like big black clouds moving in before a storm. Getting between me and what I want to say or do. Clouds. They come and they go. Makes me mad. I can’t think no more. I can’t—” He would stop. Shake his head. Lindy would reach up and lay her hand flat on his chest, and keep her hand right there. He’d close his eyes. The two of them would stay that way for a long while, and he’d be himself again. For a time.
    Now he spent most of his days in the cellar. In the place she had built for him three years ago, to calm him down. She’d hauled in the big rocks. She’d stacked up the boxes, arranged the tables and the old barrels. She’d procured the sticks and the scrap lumber, and she’d scattered all of it around the cold dirt floor. Dumped coal here and there. Gravel, too. He wanted it dark, insisted on it, and so she had unscrewed the lightbulb from the overhead fixture. Then she had climbed the stairs back up to the first floor. Closed the door behind her.
    He spent his time in a blackness that matched the blackness rising inside him. Except for the occasional thumps and groans, she didn’t hear much from him. She knew he came up the stairs at night. She’d find the results in the morning: A box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes with the top flap torn off and three-quarters of the contents gone, courtesy of a frantic plunging hand that spilled half its load on the floor on its way to his mouth. Melon rinds, with an unevenly spaced row of shallow dents marking the spots where his remaining teeth had gnawed at the sweet meat. And a sick-making, dizziness-inducing smell from the sink, where he sometimes emptied his bucket, not bothering to run the spigot to rinse the feces and urine down the drain. She had to disinfect the sink daily with Clorox. The smell was like having fingers poked in your eyes.
    Two and a half years ago, the last time he’d let her take him anywhere, the doctor at the Raythune County Medical Center—the only neurologist left in the area who would see Medicare patients—had been blunt with her: “Your father has significant and chronic health issues in addition to the neurological deficits, including emphysema and congestive heart failure. There’s no way to tell how long he might survive. The end could be fast, or it could be slow.” What the doctor didn’t say, but allowed Lindy to extrapolate from the silence that descended on the beige-walled room after his pronouncement, was this: Given his current mental state, fast might be better . She had nodded, and then she helped her father get down from the examination table. She tried to help him put on his jacket—he kept ramming his fist in the wrong armhole—but he smacked at her hands and cursed her.
    The only place her father was comfortable now was the past. The past, for him, meant the Acer Mine No. 40, twenty-seven miles out on Route 6 in rural Raythune County, where he’d worked his shift well into his sixties, tilted like a tree pushed from behind by a permanent hurricane.
    Lindy was just finishing up Part IV of The Fabric of the Cosmos . She loved the book—it was all about space and time and gravity, things you could measure, things that rewarded your deep thinking about them by proving to be solid and comprehensible, unlike things such as your feelings and your family—but now she had to stop. Time to get ready for work. She was the night manager at the station, a job she’d held since her graduation from Acker’s Gap High School two years ago.
    Another thump.
    She waited. No more noise. No yelling. Good . He probably hadn’t hurt himself, then. No reason for her to open the basement door and call down to him, asking if he was okay, a gesture that might very well be met with a yip and a snarl. Her father was in a nasty mood today, restless