Read Online Black Angus by Newton Thornburg - Free Book Online Page A

Ozarks that it even showed up on local television commercials.
    Despite her stated indifference to the past, her own as well as the rest of the world’s, Blanchard had managed to draw out of her a rough idea of what her life had been. Her mother, he understood, had been something of a child bride, bearing Little in her early teens and Ronda a couple of years later, each of them by different fathers, both of whom quickly disappeared, to be followed finally by the mother herself. After that the children were raised by their widowed grandmother, whom Ronda described as “deaf and dead,” a prematurely old woman who was almost never without a New Testament clutched in her hand, even as she sat rocking and watching television all day, every day, turned up so loud one could hear it driving past her small native stone cottage, which was situated across the river road from Ronda’s place.
    Though over the years it was Little who kept winding up in reformatories and prison, in the old woman’s eyes Ronda was the true sinner, the one who dressed like a Jezebel and toiled in a tavern, serving the devil’s own brew in a house that once had been the Lord’s. And this was only the most recent of the girl’s transgressions. At fifteen she had gotten herselfpregnant and the old woman had promptly shipped her off to a Kansas City home for unwed mothers. After having the baby and giving it up for adoption, she entered a three-year period as a cocktail waitress and topless dancer in a series of Kansas City dives, until she met an older man named C. C. Whitehead, a stolid, solvent trucker able to give her security, leisure, and a degree of luxury in the form of a brand-new sixty-foot mobile home, which he brought back to Rock County and parked on her grandmother’s place. Unfortunately he was not also able to give the girl excitement, and as the marriage degenerated, so did Whitehead, drinking and brooding and finally jackknifing his eighteen-wheeler on Interstate 44 in a Christmas-week ice storm, losing twelve thousand frying chickens and his own life, uninsured. After the funeral Ronda found herself with nothing but a small equity in the mobile home, enough however to have kept her in the area through the rest of the winter and spring in the hope of selling the trailer for enough money so she could move to California and have a little of what she called “the sweet life.” But to date no offers had even covered what she owed on the home. So she had taken the job at the Sweet Creek.
    For the Ozarks, it was not all that unusual a life, Blanchard knew, probably no more blighted and impoverished than most. Yet all he had to do was look at her to see the fearful cost of it, in the paradox that while all her parts were beautiful, the sum of her was plain. She had a dancer’s leggy, sinuous body. She had thick auburn hair and a nice face with large green eyes and a sensuous mouth. But she seldom let any light into those eyes and she almost never smiled. Her habitual expression in fact was a cross between boredom and contempt, as if she were forever waiting on a table of slobs. It was true that lately she had begun to smile more when she was alone with Blanchard. And their last time together, as she laughed at something he had said, he had been struck by her beauty, more than ever appalled at how life had abused her.
    Unhappily, that abuse showed up in the bedroom too. Despite her background as a topless dancer, he found her sexually inhibited, exhibiting none of the verve and inventive abandon he had come to expect in a woman, even one as cool and cerebral as Susan. The minute the two of them would enter her trailer, she would draw the drapes and go into the bathroom and lock the door, then take a very long and very silent bath, never saying anything to him through the paper-thin walls, never singing or humming. Blanchard meanwhile would go back to her bedroom and undress and lie there waiting for her,