The Wanton Troopers Read Online Free Page A

be doin’ his share of work around the place instead of askin’ questions about women havin’ children.”
    Mary drew Kevin’s face against her breast. “When Scampi grows up, he’s going to work with his brain. His hands are going to be soft as a girl’s — like the hands of the men who work in offices and stores in Larchmont. When he’s a man, my baby is going to have nice, soft, pink hands just like he has now. You wait and see.”
    â€œEh!” This sound, half snort and half grunt, was Martha’s way of dismissing them as hopeless. She rocked vigorously, hugging her brick.
    There was nothing that Kevin found more frustrating than his grandmother’s sermons on the certainty of poverty and the duty of humility before one’s betters. He writhed in vexation when she told him, as she often did, that within four years he would be working in the mill. He hated her for the grim satisfaction he detected in her voice. And his hate was made more vicious by the thought that she was probably right in her prediction.
    Martha did not undress at night. She lay fully clothed on her bed, and when the pain became unbearable she came downstairs and heated bricks. Then, in the darkness, with the brick clutched to her belly, she rocked and sang hymns. Often, Kevin awoke and heard her voice rise like the cry of a ghost in the darkness at the other end of the house.
    This was the hymn that she most often sang:
    There is a fountain filled with blood,
    Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
    And sinners plunged beneath that flood
    Lose all their guilty stains.
    E’er since by faith I saw that stream
    Thy flowing did supply,
    Redeeming love has been my theme
    And shall be till I die.

Four
    The mail had brought a letter from a lawyer, demanding a further payment on the house. Kevin and Mary knew that Judd would be angry when he read this letter and so, to postpone the crisis as long as possible, she hid the cellophane-faced, sinister-looking envelope under a stack of mail-order catalogues and love-story magazines on the shelf above the cot. She did not show it to Judd until late Sunday afternoon.
    On Sundays, Judd liked to do little odd jobs around the house and outbuildings. He half-soled his work boots, sewed patches on his overalls, which were stiff and black with pitch, plugged holes in pots and glued handles on broken cups. Sometimes, he even repaired a clock. Kevin had seen him devote all of an afternoon to making a clock hand from a bobby pin.
    Kevin loved to watch Judd manipulate an awl or a needle. He sat in drowsy entrancement while Judd tapped nails into leather or broke a thread between his teeth. Judd preferred to work seated on the swing in the wagonshed doorway. Here he could enjoy the sun yet avoid being observed by persons who passed on their way to church. In the planting season and again during the harvest, Judd spent his Sundays in the garden, and many times Kevin had seen him leave the field hurriedly and conceal himself behind the woodshed to elude the eyes of passing churchgoers. Judd himself never went to church.
    Late in that afternoon, Judd decided to patch one of his gum rubbers. He sat on the swing and removed the punctured boot. Squatting in the couch grass by the weather-beaten wall, Kevin watched him rub the damaged spot briskly with a file. Now the sun was on the other side of the wagonshed and great, triangular shadows crept across the heath toward the smoke stack and the trees. Robins and starlings slowed their movements and quickened the rhythm of their singing, as they always did at dusk. Kevin chewed a blade of grass, letting its juice, which smelled and tasted of fermentation, fill his mouth. Mosquitoes moved in from the swamps and began their dusk song, so ponderous compared to the shrill, stabbing sound they emitted during the day. Insects lit on his bare arms and legs, falling silent as their needles pierced his skin and sucked his blood. He brushed