Read Online Arly by Robert Newton Peck - Free Book Online

had a camera right now, I’d take your photograph myself.”
    Miss Angel carried on and on.
    So I turned myself away and headed alone for Shack Row, a place where there weren’t no fancy ladies or gussy-up clothes. For some reason, the gray boards of Shack Row and the plain of its people was a welcome sight, a lot more comforting than the picture I could remember of Miss Angel’s bonnet on Essie’s head. Thinking on it turned my hands to fists. Somebody ought to stand up to Roscoe Broda and to Captain Tant.
    But, as I recalled about school and Miss Hoe, I sure weren’t fixing to ever sass Miss Liddy Tant. No sir. Because they way I figured, it be Miss Liddy who’d done Jailtown a decent turn.
    â€œThank you, Miss Liddy,” I said to the heavens.
    There weren’t much sense in hanging around Shack Row, and I didn’t feel much like looking up Huff Cooter. He’d only badmouth our school. So instead, I took me a stroll toward the big lake. Okeechobee could certain shine in the afternoon, like the sunshine near to polished it into silver. Squinting and shading my eyes with a hand, I looked out across the water to where its edge greeted the sky. Sure was a piece away. It took me to wonder what lay beyond Okeechobee.
    â€œWhatever it be,” I said, “it’s distant.”
    In school today, Miss Hoe said that our entireworld was round, like an orange she was holding in her hand. Nobody believed it except me. Because whatever Miss Hoe said, to my thinking, was the Gospel truth. Our teacher also said we didn’t have to take her word for it, because all we had to do was level our eyes across Lake Okeechobee and take a look for ourselfs. We’d notice that the lake appeared to be flatter than a board, but it weren’t, as there was a curve to it like the outside of her orange.
    â€œLearning,” Miss Hoe had told us, “is something like an orange too.” On the outside, it weren’t too good to taste. Even bitter as a orange rind. But inside, once the learning settles in your head, it becomes sweet. Sweeter than candy.
    To prove it, Miss Hoe broke the big orange apart. But first, we had to taste the skin. Then the inside. Huff Cooter had made a face at me, as if to say that Miss Hoe weren’t telling anything that he already didn’t know. Yet I reasoned real quicksome what she was driving at, and it made a spate of sense.
    I spotted a rowing boat.
    The boat was heading my way, away off to the left, nosing through the shadows of the overhanging cypress trees, riding low in the water. Two men were aboard. One was rowing. It made me itch to learn who they were and what they were doing. As the boat nosed closer, it was plain to see that the two gents was plume hunters.
    Their sculler boat was loaded high with a cargo of dead birds. A lot were white egrets. Some was pink curlews and spoonbills. One orange flamingo. Near the stern, where the man who weren’t rowing sat with a pair of shotguns, was a basket of dead parakeets. It weren’t a happy sight to see. Alive birds are. Not these.
    â€œBoy!” one of the men shouted to me. “What be the name of this here sorrowful place?”
    â€œJailtown,” I said.
    The man who’d spoke at me was bigger than the rowing man. He was smaller and leaner. The big man who was sitting the stern spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the lake, just before I heard the prow of their rowboat grind her nose into the shore sand, then rock to a rest.
    â€œYeah,” the man said, “this here’s the right town.”
    â€œHow come you got to shoot so many of them pretty birds?” I asked.
    Squinting at me like I was three kinds of fool, the big man answered. “Hats,” he said. “Ladies who dress up real fancy, in city places, wear all them birdie feathers on a hat.” He spat again. “But it ain’t no business of yours.”
    â€œNo,” I said, “I