The Monument Read Online Free Page A

fine, Emma, just fine.”
    And of course it turned out to be, but not quite in the way Fred meant it.

Eight

    A WEEK PASSED, then another one, and summer rolled into the busiest part of itself. The elevator was humming, sometimes with trucks waiting in line to bring the grain in and dump it and go back for more. Farmers worked until dark, and Fred stayed open often until midnight or later so they could bring in the last trucks of grain for the day. Then the next morning theywould start at daylight and we’d have to be open not long after then to be ready for them, truck after truck rolling in to dump their golden grain, the dust so thick even inside the office you could choke on it, and no way to stop.
    There was so much paperwork that I had to be there almost all the time with Fred just to keep up, totaling the grain amounts and filing them in the old wooden filing cabinets next to the peanut machine.
    I didn’t think it would ever end, and I took to taking morning walks just after we opened the doors. There was a short quiet time just at dawn before the trucks started to come in from the fields, just an hour or so, and I would take Python and we would walk through the town. Bolton was so small that after a couple of times you’d think you knew it all but there was always something different happening. The birds were always singing and the sun wasn’t hot yet and I wasn’t covered with grain dust yet and Python seemed to like it. I let him pick the way to go, just moving along next to me, his shoulder against my leg, and on one of the morning walkshe took me so that I met the artist Mrs. Langdon had sent for to make the war memorial.
    Mick.
    Although at first I didn’t know he was the artist.
    At first I just thought he was a pervert.
    Python and I always walked a different way. Sometimes we’d move through the small downtown area because Hopper’s bakery would be taking out the first rolls of the day. The smell of fresh bread came out of the back doors of the bakery into the alley and made our mouths water. Hopper would come to the door and give us each a roll, and Python would take his ever so gently, and we’d eat them hot and steaming.
    Sometimes we’d go down in back of Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium because Lyle had a thing about cats and must have had a dozen of them, and Python liked to put them up the power poles. He didn’t catch them and maybe even didn’t want to, but it was fun for him once in a while to decorate the power poles with them, and it probably kept the cats from getting too careless.
    This morning Python had taken me by the bakery and Hopper had given us each a sticky cinnamon roll. Python wasn’t much on manners so he’d taken his down kind of in one gulp. I ate mine slower, and when I was done my hands were all over sticky so I let Python lick them. We were standing at one end of the alley, and I looked up while he was licking my hands, and there was Mick.
    Actually there was an old station wagon with rust so bad it looked to be falling apart. The back window was rolled halfway down and the left front fender was patched over with silver duct tape until you couldn’t see anything but tape. Jammed into the driver’s-side window was the bottom of a man.
    It had clothes on, the bottom, but there it was, filling the window, and I stopped. Python made that sound low in his throat so you thought the ground was shaking.
    I knew all about perverts from what the nuns had told us—or sometimes hadn’t told us—in the orphanage and also what we learned inschool so I thought naturally I was seeing a pervert.
    I also thought—just as naturally—how that pervert would feel if I let Python go and he took about half of that bottom off for a snack to follow up his cinnamon roll.
    But something held me back. It didn’t seem right for a pervert to be sitting with his bottom propped in the side of an old station wagon window at dawn in Bolton, Kansas.
    Plus it wasn’t moving.
    “It’s dead