A Flag for Sunrise Read Online Free

happened and explaining it thoroughly. He made his voice repeat the explanation over and over lest it be lost and his reason overthrown.
    I buried her myself, Father Egan heard himself explain. Of course, I couldn’t tell anyone.

On the day Holliwell left for Central America, his wife had volunteered to arrange the weekend outing of a brilliant young paranoid. Holliwell’s wife was a Master of Social Work at the state hospital. Before seven, she drove the girls to school and went on to the facility to pick up the paranoid and conduct him home to his nervous parents in the suburbs of Wilmington.
    Holliwell finished his packing alone; he and his wife had taken leave of each other during the night. When his bag was locked and standing by the front door, he went into the kitchen and made himself a strong bloody mary. He drank it by the living-room window, looking out at the front yard where his magnolia hung snowbound and his mountain ash stood tortured and skeletal in an envelope of ice.
    She was a little bit in love with this one, Holliwell thought—and the man was unquestionably dangerous. But she would almost certainly be all right. She was very sensible.
    His plane left from Kennedy the following morning and he planned to pass the day in New York, first lunching with Marty Nolan, then checking into his favorite hotel to see what the evening might bring. He no longer knew anyone who lived in the city. At four or so, he would phone his wife to make sure that everything had gone well.
    He finished the first drink and then had another, not bothering with breakfast. By the time he put his suitcase in the back of the Volvo, he was high enough to stop at the smoke shop in town and buy his first pack of cigarettes in a month. Driving to the turnpike, he smoked one cigarette after another.
    The road to the pike—like the road his wife would drive to Wilmington—ran through pine forest and swamp. Each time hepassed over a culvert, or the frozen course of a creek dividing one stand of pine from another, the picture would come into his mind of his wife lying dead in the woods, her red and white scarf knotted round her neck in a thin line, her bloodied fingers stiffening across a log.
    After the turnpike entrance, he hit the radio and in a mile or two WWVA eased down from space, selling lucky crosses and Christian good fortune. Holliwell tuned it in carefully and between commercials heard a singular musical recitation, delivered in up-country dialect, about a young football player.
    The youth on the record was his high school’s star quarterback; it was the Big Game against the school in the next hollow and at half time the home team was a couple of touchdowns behind. During the half-time break, the boy disappeared from the locker room and he was late returning for the third quarter.
    “Where in the hell you been?” demanded the anxious hometown coach, who was decent but hard. He swore at the boy and shoved him toward the line of scrimmage.
    There then commenced an astonishing display of unforgettable schoolboy ball. The kid played like a young man possessed, and the fans in the little country-and-Western town had never seen the like of him. The opposition was devastated, the coach awestruck and penitent. Amid the jubilation outside the showers, he drew the young quarterback quietly aside.
    “Coach,” the youth explained, “my father was blind.”
    The boy’s father had been blind and for a week had lain upon his deathbed. The boy had been phoning the hospital regularly and during half time had learned of his father’s death.
    The coach cleared his throat. How then to explain the spectacle only just witnessed—the sixty-yard touchdown passes, the seventy-yard scoring runs?
    “You see, coach,” the boy said quietly, “it’s the first time he’s ever seen me play.”
    By the time WWVA faded out, Holliwell was aware of the tears streaming down his face, staining his tie, wetting his moustache and the stub of his