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

farm when he wanted to and drive his old grader down the roads and along the bar ditches and run everybody off he didn’t like and spend time figuring out just what had happened to him.
    Buck said he guessed the old man probably used the farm to get back at Edwina by just never inviting anybody she ever knew or that he ever knew when he knew her to hunt with him, and by paying him, Buck, to take people in and out all winter for a thousand dollars a season and letting that information get back to Edwina by mentioning it to the waiters in the dining room when he came into town to eat his free meal and stay in his free room.
    He said the old man would come down to the cabin late at night and have a bottle of Williams and an old R. E. Lee Hotel glass and pour Buck a level and watch him drink it, then sit back and cry like a baby. Buck said he had to just keep on drinking until it was gone, because he couldn’t stand listening to the old mancry and tell the story over and over again. Finally, he said, he’d tell Rudolph his was just a clear case of bad timing, and then go to sleep. The old man sat there, he said, staring out the screen door into his rice fields not able to sleep because he had a problem he couldn’t understand. And Buck said that he never would have drunk so much if it hadn’t been for all those nights.
    He walked around to the side of the house and knocked on the door, thinking he could ask what had happened to the old man and go on. The old woman came to the screen and smiled as if she recognized him, and said Rudolph still had his rooms.
    He thought he ought to forget it and go back. He smiled at the woman and she pushed open the screen and he got inside before he knew it and she pointed up the narrow hallway to the upstairs, and he went up. He felt like he was making a mistake acting like he wanted to see the old man when he didn’t want to at all, and was disappointed to know he was alive still, when he shouldn’t have been alive at all. The door at the top was closed, and a thin pane of light radiated over the sill. He could hear the woman reading her newspaper out loud in the kitchen and the sound of her chair groaning.
    He knocked and the old man said to come in, standing in the middle of the room under a hanging bulb, wearing poplin pants and no shirt, staring wild-eyed as if he were getting ready to make a charge. He looked heavy-chested and bent to one side, his white hair stuck up in tussocks over his ears. He regretted ever coming inside.
    The room was sour. The old man looked at him intently, as if he thought he recognized him, the way the old woman did, but couldn’t be sure.
    â€œSee Minor,” he said suddenly, “about the work. Don’t see me.”
    â€œNo sir,” he said, and pressed back against the molding of the door, thinking about getting out.
    â€œWho is that?” Rudolph said, and stepped up under the bulb.
    â€œHewes,” he said. “I used to work on number two.”
    The old man got a step closer. “Took off without saying whoop-dee-doo, too,” the old man shouted, like it had happened last night. “I come out a week later wonderin where in the shit you was, and there was my house wide open, lights burning, propane still in the pipes.” He took a step back and humped down beside his desk table. “What do you say about that?”
    â€œI had to leave of a sudden,” he said, fixing his eyes on the single closed window behind the old man’s head.
    â€œWell, there ain’t no more house!”
    â€œWhat come of it?” he said.
    The old man squinted as if he had just decided he was really somebody else. “Remember Buck Bennett?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œBuck Bennett was a crazy son-of-a-bitch. You remember that?” The old man smiled companionably as if he could see Buck at that very moment drunk and falling down.
    â€œI guess,” he said.
    â€œHe was a drunk, now.”