Dark River Road Read Online Free

he’d seen Mama dissect him with a few soft-spoken words. Rainey’s reaction to that was always violent. Like he knew she told the truth and couldn’t stand it.
    Chantry left by the back door, let it shut gently behind him. He’d have to hurry to get there before services started and everyone would turn around to look at him when he went in the front door. It was bad enough having to go, it’d be worse to give people a chance to talk about him always being late. They talked enough as it was. He’d only been in two fights in his life with anyone besides Beau and Rafe, but most of Cane Creek seemed to have the idea that he was always in a fight with someone.
    Probably because of his fight with Chris Quinton. That’d been the year before and no one had forgotten it yet. Chris’s grandfather was old man Quinton, and everybody in town had talked about the fight for months afterward. Mama had been so upset with him, and he’d had to promise not to ever fight again even though he knew he might not be able to keep that promise. Lines got crossed a lot.
    Some lines were pretty definite in Cane Creek. There were kids like Chris who wore expensive clothes and drove new cars, and there were kids like Donny Ray Caldwell, whose daddy worked at the cotton plant and made enough money to have a nice size house and almost new car. Then there were kids from Sugarditch. Like Chantry.
    He hated being lumped in with the kids who lived in tarpaper shacks, missed school most of the time, and were regular visitors over in the Quinton County juvenile detention center. They drank too much, smoked dope, and caused trouble. He tried to stay away from all that. Mama would skin him alive if he got into that kind of trouble.
    The sun was already bright, beating down on his bare head as he left the house. The street baked quietly. A hot smell hung in the air, jimson weeds and dust, and creosote from the railroad ties mixed with the smell of tar. There were only three houses on Liberty Road. It was gravel here at their end, and stopped at the blacktopped road leading into town. On the other end it dead-ended into some fields that had once grown sugar cane, but usually grew cotton or soybeans now. Blight or something like that had ended the sugar cane long before he’d moved here. Economic blight, Dempsey had said. Beyond the barren fields lay wooded land, some of it thick, some of it swampland. Sugar Creek meandered through oak, maples, wild dogwoods and pines to where it joined with the cut-off into the Mississippi River. Muddy banks rose surprisingly steep in some places, when farther south it planed out into flat fields edged with kudzu.
    He took a shortcut across an empty lot with waist-high weeds, then crossed the railroad tracks that stitched a boundary line between Sugarditch and the rest of Cane Creek. Mostly, Sugarditch had shotgun shacks built on cinder block foundations that housed families who worked for Quinton. He owned the houses and he owned the people in them. The history books might say slavery had ended almost a hundred and thirty years before, but Chantry figured there were different kinds of slavery still at work in Cane Creek.
    New Cane Creek Baptist Church sat on the corner of Main and Forrest Streets. It’d been built after the first church burned down twenty years before. Now it had white aluminum siding, a tall steeple with a bell, stained glass windows with white doves and blue flowers and red drops of blood, and had cost the congregation more money than the school cost the county. It wasn’t the only church in town, but the only one the white folks who worked for Quinton attended. There was a Methodist church and a Presbyterian church, and over near Tunica County there was a Catholic church for the papists. There was a black church, too, and sometimes Chantry heard glad shouting and singing that sounded a lot better than the solemn hymns sung at New Cane Creek. But any white man who worked for old man Quinton went to the