The Legend of Bagger Vance Read Online Free

expecting to raise him. “Mr. Junah, it’s Hardy Greaves, come to hail you!”
    No one answered for the longest time. I got off my bike and peeked in the big Georgian windows. The front hall was lighted, but by only a single flame on top of a piano. All the furniture was covered in ghosty white sheets.
    Finally Ezra, Mr. Junah’s main man, appeared in the side door and waved me over with a cross expression. “Master Hardy, what you doing out here this shade of night? You not hurt, are you?” I explained rapidly that my father knew of my whereabouts and in fact, along with the town elders, had dispatched me.
    Ezra let me in, declaring he hadn’t seen such urgency in no boy’s eye since the day we whooped the Kaiser. “You sure Mr. Junah’s awake?” I kept asking. “I hate to disturb him but I got to.”
    “Mr. Junah don’t hardly never sleep no more,” Ezra told me as we padded down underlit hallways. “The poor man is up all the night, just a-steaming and a-stewing.”
    We passed beautifully appointed rooms, all shrouded over insheets and dust covers. Where was Junah? I started getting scared all over again as Ezra led me outdoors, across another soaking stretch of grass.
    We were headed back to the old slave quarters.
    I trucked in after Ezra through a door so low even I had to stoop. Down a clammy stone corridor and there we were, stepping out into the ancient slave kitchen, a broad low-roofed room where the cooking had been done for fifty field men, maybe more. I blinked in the smoky dimness and then I saw Mr. Junah.
    He was wearing a blue dungaree shirt, salty with sweat and open to the navel. His hair was long, over his ears, and hung unparted in glistening sheets in the lamplight. He wore clamming trousers, open to the knees, with no shoes. He was sitting at a hundred-year-old coarse-cut serving table with his crossed feet propped up and a long Kentucky cheroot between his teeth.
    “Hardy, my boy! What a felicitous surprise! Come in and join us in a cold chicken sandwich!”
    I was just a boy, and had glimpsed little if any of the darker grown-up world. But one thing even my innocent eyes could not fail to see. Mr. Junah was dead, stinking drunk.

Five
    I ADVANCED TENTATIVELY INTO THE GLOOM . Three or four colored men, apparently Junah’s hands, sat and stood around the margins, faces and arms so black they seemed to blend into the ironwood walls.
    “Gentlemen,” Mr. Junah addressed them, his sun-burnished arm stretching elegantly to indicate me, “may I present the only male in Chatham County who isn’t completely full of shit.”
    His hand clapped my shoulder warmly, I heard low chuckling from the darkness. I was frightened. I had never heard a gentleman utter such frightful profanity and had no idea what to make of it. Junah queried me as to whether my parents knew of my whereabouts at this hour and I blurted my nervous response. I could smell the liquor on Junah’s breath. I began to tremble.
    “Don’t be afrighted, Hardy lad. Your host is far from inebriated. There’s not enough whiskey in the state to get me as drunk as I need to be.” He ordered a milk brought for me. One of the men fetched it from an ice chest against the far wall.
    Then I realized Junah was not alone at the table.
    At the far end sat a black man of about forty years, tall and striking, wearing threadbare suspendered trousers and a worn English-cut jacket. He was not drinking, but sat upright with impeccable posture, dark eyes like pools soaking up the lamplight.
    Here was another shock to my untutored sight: a colored man sitting at the same table with a white. I must have gawked, or even started at the raw unholy cheek of it, because the man smiled and tipped his battered hat. I could feel my face flushing. The nerve of this fellow…
    “You offered the boy a sandwich, Ran,” the black man spoke. “Don’t you think you should make good?”
    Ran? Junah’s first name. Worse, short for his first name.
    The gall and