Read Online A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford - Free Book Online

right’ again and that’ll be enough.”
    â€œAll right.”
    A silence opened through the line.
    â€œJust think about that,” he said, “and them shower baths.”
    â€œGod,” she said, moaning. “You’re going to make me come.”
    â€œI’ll be there,” he said, wanting to get out.
    â€œRobard?”
    â€œHuh.”
    â€œIs something the matter with you?”
    â€œNothing is,” he said. He folded the letter with one hand and stuffed it in his shirt pocket on top of the Butterfinger wrapper.
    â€œI thought something was the matter,” she said.
    â€œEverything’s wonderful,” he said.
    â€œIt is,” she said. “Don’t you think everything’s wonderful?”
    â€œYes, hon, I do.”
    â€œI do,” she said sweetly. “Now that you’re here, I do. Everything’s been so awful.”
    â€œI’m hurrying,” he said, unable to get his breath again.
    â€œOh, good God,” she said, and hung up.

11
    He stopped in Hazen to buy cigarettes and walked toward where the old man kept his rooms. Hazen was fifty miles from Little Rock, a rice prairie town along the Rock Island, a white stone grain elevator by the tracks, a few cages and poultry houses catering to duck hunters, and a smatter of houses and mobile homes in the oaks and crape myrtles, and all the rest save a pecan orchard given up to the rice, planted in tawny, dented fields to the next town, twenty miles in all directions.
    By the time he had come up from Helena eleven years ago and gone to work for Rudolph, watching his sluice gates in the summer and sitting out winters in the little shotgun house the old man had built as a warming house for the duck hunters, Rudolph’s troubles were all over with and there wasn’t anything left for the old man to do but sit up nights and wonder about it.
    He crossed the Rock Island tracks and walked down the right of way through the suck weeds and across the gravel path to where he could see the white plank house with the old man’s rooms recessed in the dark corner under the south eave. He could remember the old man slumped on the broken shingle of his mattress,his undershirt catching the pale light in the room, coughing and snorting and staring across the empty floor, trying to think of something to say by way of important instructions, before he sent him back to the pump house to tend the gates. He could hear the landlady downstairs, rattling the tiny trays she used to coddle the old man’s eggs, while Rudolph rested his belly on his thighs, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the word to come into his head that he could give and that might make sense to somebody. Finally he would murmur something low out of the cavity of his chest, some gate to close or spillway to wind open for an hour or a ditch to inspect for seepage, anything to keep the help moving water from place to place. The old man would stop and snort and gaze out in the dark, and he would slip down the stairs, through the hot kitchen, and take out across the cold fields. Like that.
    When he had first come up from Helena there had been, he remembered, a man named Buck Bennett who had worked for old man Rudolph, hired to run local fishermen off the reservoirs, patrol the roads, and see over the property when he wasn’t too drunk to find the deputy’s badge the old man paid for, or too drunk to keep his old jeep out of the bar ditches, where the old man promised it would remain, since he wouldn’t let a wrecker come on the property to pull him out, though he said Buck could come and look at his jeep whenever he wanted to if he had any doubts about its still being there.
    Buck would come down late in the evening, drink a pint of whiskey, and sit on the one claw-toed chair the pump cabin had and talk about the old man.
    Buck said that the old man had come down sometime in 1941, from Republican City, Nebraska, had sold