Read Online Original Sins by Lisa Alther - Free Book Online

she was ten. Her father was a drunkard and her mother supported them all by turning their home into a boarding house for newly arrived mill workers. She’d been working all her life—first on the farm, then helping her mother with the boarders, then shift work at the mill, and now as secretary to Mr. Sutton at Sutton Insurance. He was the best agent in the office, and all the other girls looked up to her. She wore a hat and white gloves to work now instead of coveralls, and sat at a desk with a fresh flower in a bud vase. All this effort to get where they were, with a house and a car and all the food they wanted, and Junior took it for granted. Seemed like that he thought it all fell from the sky. It scared the wits out of her to think he’d take after her own father and look to the rest of them to carry him.
    â€œShut up, Raymond,” Jed muttered from the couch. “Don’t joke about Mama’s tree thing. You know it means a lot to her.”
    â€œBut not to me,” Raymond replied as he headed for his room. “Why she wants to keep track of a bunch of scruffy crackers and horse thieves and half-breeds, who sat rotting in a cove in Kentucky for centuries, is more than I’ll ever understand.” He slammed his door.
    â€œThey wasn’t thieves,” Jed called. “They was pioneers. They was better men than you’ll ever be, prissing around with your camera like some kind of goddam Yankee newspaper reporter!”
    â€œJed honey, watch your language,” his mother called.
    Jed walked over to the chart. It was two halves of a circle, joined in the center by his and Raymond’s names. Radiating out from their names were hundreds of names of ancestors. Whenever he was feeling lousy—like right now when he’d been fighting with Sally, or when he brought home straight C’s on his report card, or when they’d lost a ball game—he’d come look at this thing and feel better. He was the hub of his entire family. Its whole purpose appeared to be to bring Jed Tatro into existence. It had taken a dozen generations to get from prison in England to Newland, Tennessee. All these dead people was expecting big things from him, and he intended not to disappoint them. Already he was varsity tackle on a state championship team. And at the end of every year his class had voted him “Best Personality.” He sometimes thought he hated Raymond for his scorn for this chart and his people, and for the way he used this scorn to hurt their mama. Raymond was always penciling in names that no one but him thought was funny—Alger Hiss and Martin Luther King and Stalin and Mae West. Raymond thought he was a regular scream. But it pretty much proved that nobody else did when his class never voted him “Best Sense of Humor.” They never voted old Raymond nothing. In the first place he looked almost thirty years old, with his big thick glasses and thin hair. Most Likely to Recede, they ought to vote him. (Now that was funny.) He had no friends. You saw him around school with that Audio-Visual Club bunch—those fairies that put together ham radios from kits. Hundreds of dollars those creeps spent, trying to talk about the weather to a bunch of foreigners. They all dressed like models for a rummage sale—rayon shirts, white socks, sweater vests with reindeers on them, pleated trousers. A bunch of brains. Hell, they played chess on Friday nights when everyone else in town was at the ball games. Yankees mostly. Didn’t know no better. Their fathers was chemists and stuff over at the paper plant. One of them’s father was that new man at the mill—Mackay or something. Jed’s daddy had come home the other night grumbling about Mackay bringing down this faggot from some Yankee university who sat around with a stopwatch timing how long everyone sat in the can.
    Jed didn’t like to think about his childhood. He’d been scrawny and weak.