Read Online Gap Creek by Robert Morgan - Free Book Online Page A

still green in the slender cove, though it was already fall on the higher slopes.
    The worst thing about the house was that Mr. Pendergast, who rented it to us, lived there hisself. He lived in the bedroom at the front of the house, and our rent was the meals I fixed for him and the washing I did for him. He was a crusty old widower and I seen I was going to have to humor him. I was just a young bride and Hank took me down there to start housekeeping in that little place, and to cook for old man Pendergast.
    Mr. Pendergast was a short man with a huge head of gray hair and hair growing out of his ears. He always looked at you with a squint when he talked. “Don’t you worry about me,” he said the night we arrived, when I come in with all my clothes tied up in a pasteboard box and a pillowcase, after walking all the way from Mount Olivet, “I don’t eat hardly nothing, and I’m so quiet you’ll never know I’m around.”
    He showed me where the kitchen was and where all the pots and pans was. His wife had died three or four years before, and he had let the house go the way most men would. Every inch of the floor needed to be scoured and scrubbed. You never seen such filth as was built up around and behind the cookstove. I seen it would take me a week to get the place cleaned up so it didn’t turn your stomach.
    “What do you like for breakfast?” I said.
    “Just fix me some biscuits and gravy,” Mr. Pendergast said, “and maybe a poached egg.”
    I had heard of poached eggs, but I had never made a poached egg. I’d have to ask Hank what a poached egg was.
    “We won’t have no bacon until we kill the hog,” Mr. Pendergast said. “But it’s almost time for hog killing.”
    LATER WHEN WE went to bed that first night I was almost afraid to move in the attic bedroom, for the floorboards creaked and the bedsprings creaked. And I was afraid Mr. Pendergast was right below us listening to every sound we made. The floorboards groaned and the bedsprings moaned when we got in. “Shhhh,” I said to Hank.
    “Pendergast is deaf as a fencepost,” Hank said, not even lowering his voice.
    “Even a fencepost can hear this bed creak,” I said.
    After Hank blowed out the lamp we laid in the bumpy bed in the room smelling of old wood and smoke. Hank turned over to face me and the springs banged on the slats of the bed. I giggled cause I was a little nervous. But I wasn’t scared or worried like so many brides are supposed to be. I had thought all my life about this first night in our own house, and now that it was here I was more worried about waking up Mr. Pendergast than anything else.
    “Shhhh,” I said again.
    When Hank put his lips to my ear it felt so odd and good it made me shiver. And when he put his finger on my nipple it felt like funny bones all over my body had been touched. When he run his hand over my shoulder and under my armpit and down to my belly, I thought little sparks must be jumping off my skin in the dark.
    I felt something pulling my nightgown up over my knees and over my thighs and over my belly. I giggled and the bed creaked as Hank moved over me. And then I felt something hot and wet in my belly button, and I knowed it was Hank’s tongue going in and out and round and round the navel. He licked the little hairs around mynavel and stuck his tongue in the hole. I hoped there wasn’t any lint in there.
    It was all so strange and different from what I had imagined. I didn’t hardly know what was happening. It was like the world had been tilted and turned in some way. And time had stopped, or slowed down. Time had been turned on its side and moved in a curve. When Hank got on top of me and rocked the bed, I felt numb with his weight, and I heard the headboard of the bed knock on the wall. I thought of Mr. Pendergast below listening. I wondered if this was it. Was this what everybody talked about and thought about so much?
    Stop, I wanted to say. You stop that. But I couldn’t. You quit that, I