The Longest Road Read Online Free Page B

been tucked between them and with his foot cleared away the mound. “Get your rabbits and let’s go.”
    Bud didn’t want to pick them up, but Daddy would think he was a baby if he said so. And there were the nickels.
    It was a scary, brown, dead world they moved through. Not even a grasshopper chirred up from the Johnson grass and young Russian thistles that had choked the ditches when Bud had come this way. Everything was buried. The lacy new fronds had been scoured off the few black locust trees. The sandhill plum thicket was stripped of leaves and tender buds, only a few bare twigs thrusting from a mound of dust.
    Maybe the world had ended. Shaking again, Bud tightened his grip on Daddy’s hand. Maybe Mama had been raptured up to heaven and managed to take Laurie with her. Maybe he and Daddy were the only people left! But Daddy was saved. He’d have gone to heaven, too. Unless—unless his coming after Bud, trying to keep him from dying, was some kind of a sin.
    Through the veil of dust, the elevator’s dull sheen towered above the rest of the town, higher than the Methodist steeple, which Bud had to squint to make out, higher than the square, dark hulk of the red-brick bank building. Then there was a sound of engines and headlights flickered on the road out of town.
    Two shapes took form, one smaller than the other. One was coughing. “Rachel!” Daddy let go of Bud and hurried through the drifts as fast as he could.
    Bud plunged after him. Mama, wrapped in a damp sheet, left Daddy’s arms to hold Bud tight. Laurie hugged Daddy and he gathered them all close. They were still like that when the first of a line of trucks and cars pulled up and Barney Smith shouted to the vehicles behind, “They’re here! Both of them! They’re all right!”
    The world hadn’t come to an end.
    But it did. Mama kept coughing. She came down with dust pneumonia again, coughed up mud, clots of it that were filling her lungs. This time she died.
    The body in the coffin looked like a life-size china-faced doll in Mama’s only good dress and the white summer shoes she had admired in the store window. Bud had bought them with his hoarded nickels because Daddy had been so ashamed that her only pair of shoes had worn-out soles.
    Dust rippled like a bleached tan ocean over the grass in the cemetery, covering the headstones. At least Mama’s grave was under a honey locust. The storm had buried all the irises and daffodils but the tabernacle ladies sent a big spray of white carnations. Mama’s only living close relative, a half-brother who’d gone out to Oregon to rive timber, wired American Beauty roses. Laurie had broken off the only branch of the cherry tree that still had a few buds left when the sheet was untied. The tabernacle women had been bringing in food since Mama got sick. After the funeral, they put the extension leaf in the round table and spread a big dinner. Laurie couldn’t eat though there were things that had seldom been on the table before: ham and fried chicken, all kinds of salads, pickles, and relishes, besides mashed potatoes and canned green beans and peas, canned peaches and pears, and a dozen kinds of pies and cakes.
    People said what a good woman Mama had been and how she was bound to be in heaven and the dust had broken her health and who knew what lay ahead so maybe God had been merciful to take her home.
    Laurie wanted to scream at them, yank the tablecloth off and crash the food to the floor. She ran to her room and cried, though she still thought she’d surely wake up and find out it wasn’t real, that Mama was alive.
    The next week passed in a haze, though Laurie made sure Buddy’s face was clean and his eyes clear of duck-butter before they went to school. Every night, she dreamed the world was ending and woke up half out of bed, wanting to run to her mother. Then she remembered. Strange how she forgot, how it would seem for a