Read Online Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth - Free Book Online

wearily conscious of the endless petty inconveniences that would nag him if Gribble balked at every doorway.
    “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Gribble,” he said with an edge on his voice. “It’s a perfectly ordinary fly-blown slummy bachelor’s kitchen.” The man smiled meagerly. Justin held the door open and waited; Gribble stepped convulsively over the threshold, closing his eyes for a moment. Justin closed the door quietly on Gribble’s rigid back; instinct told him that to let it slam in its normal violent fashion would immediately involve him in a pack of trouble.
    “Sit down and have some coffee,” he told the little man. Coffee was not casually drunk these days. If you had it, you saved it for a good jolt in the morning. But he had to make this man relax; otherwise life would be an unbearable round of walking on eggs.
    Gribble sat and said “Thank you” into his steaming cup.
    “It isn’t such a bad life here,” Justin said tentatively. “I think you’ll eat a little better than you would in town. You can hold back eggs and hide your chickens when they come around. And the work won’t be too hard with the two of us. Hell, wherever you are you have to work—it might as well be here.”
    “That’s right,” said Gribble eagerly.
    The conversation then petered out. They finished their coffee and Justin led the way to the porch. “The barn needs cleaning out,” he said. “I’ll show you where the—” He stopped. Gribble stood inside the kitchen and he outside, the screen door between them.
    Justin sighed and held the door open for the little man. With an apologetic smile Gribble lunged through the doorway, eyes shut for a moment.
    So it went through the afternoon. Gribble walked willingly into the barn and worked hard, but when Justin sent him to the tool shed built on the house for a trenching spade he was gone ten minutes. Justin went after him, swearing. It was, of course, the tool-shed door. Gribble was reaching for the handle, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch it.
    Justin opened the door grimly, yanked out the spade, handed it to Gribble, and closed the door. His resolution to let Gribble be Gribble cracked wide open. “What is all this?” he demanded.
    The little man said faintly: “I had a very disagreeable experience once. Very disagreeable.” He leaned against the tool-shed wall, his face white. “I’d rather not discuss it.”
    Justin, alarmed, said: “All right. We won’t. Let’s get back to the barn—if you can make it?”
    Gribble could make it. He worked through to dinnertime, hard and well. Justin cooked a wretched bachelor’s meal big enough for two and held the door for Gribble to come in and eat. He didn’t eat much; something was on his mind. He finally asked if he could have a cot on the porch instead of a bedroom.
    “Sure,” said Justin. “I’ll get a cot from the attic.” And to himself: I might have expected it.
    After dinner they had three hours of light and used it to haul water from the spring up the road to the tank in the cow barn. When he did the job himself, he could use nothing but a pair of galvanized pails. Gribble’s help meant that between them they could fill a hundred-pound milk can on each trip. Justin began to feel a little more optimistic about meeting the brutal new milk norm. Each of his cows would, for the first time since the pasture spring went dry in June, get all the water she wanted that night. In his cheerfulness he scarcely noticed Gribble except as the hand on the other handle of the hundred-pound can. But when they topped off the tank with their twenty-fourth load, an exhausted voice asked him: “Is there more to do?”
    Gribble was on the verge of collapse. “My God,” Justin said, “I’m sorry. You’re out of the hospital—I didn’t think. Cows come first,” he added bitterly. “Sure, we can knock off. I’ll get that cot.”
    The little man slumped on the porch steps while he set it up in the