Read Online The Early Stories by John Updike - Free Book Online

him. The dog’s ears, laid flat against his skull in fear, were folded so intricately, so—he groped for the concept—
surely
. Where the dull-studded collar made the fur stand up, each hair showed a root of soft white under the length, black-tipped, of the metal color that had lent the dog its name. In his agitation Copper panted through nostrils that were elegant slits, like two healed cuts, or like the keyholes of a dainty lock of black, grained wood. His whole whorling, knotted, jointed body was a wealth of such embellishments. And in the smell of the dog’s hair David seemed to descend through many finely differentiated layers of earth: mulch, soil, sand, clay, and the glittering mineral base.
    But when he returned to the house, and saw the books arranged on the low shelves, fear dully returned. The four adamant volumes of Wells like four thin bricks, the green Plato that had puzzled him with its dialogue form and hard-to-picture shadow show, the dead Galsworthy and “Elizabeth,” Grandpa’s mammoth dictionary, Grandpa’s old Bible, the limp-covered Bible that he himself had received on becoming confirmed a member of the Firetown Lutheran Church—at the sight of these, the memory of his fear reawakened and came around him. He had grown stiff and stupid in its embrace. His parents tried to think of ways to entertain him.
    â€œDavid, I have a job for you to do,” his mother said one evening at the table.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIf you’re going to take that tone perhaps we’d better not talk.”
    â€œWhat tone? I didn’t take any tone.”
    â€œYour grandmother thinks there are too many pigeons in the barn.”
    â€œWhy?” David turned to look at his grandmother, but she sat there staring at the burning lamp with her usual expression of bewilderment. Her irises were pale discs of crazed crystal.
    Mother shouted, “Mom, he wants to know why!”
    Granmom made a jerky, irritable motion with her bad hand, as if generating the force for utterance, and said, “They foul the furniture.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Mother said. “She’s afraid for that old Olinger furniture that we’ll never use. David, she’s been after me for a month about those poor pigeons. She wants you to shoot them.”
    â€œI don’t want to kill anything especially,” David said.
    Daddy said, “The kid’s like you are, Elsie. He’s too good for this world. Kill or be killed, that’s my motto.”
    His mother said loudly, “Mother, he doesn’t want to do it.”
    â€œNot?” The old lady’s eyes distended as if in alarm, and her claw descended slowly to her lap.
    â€œOh, I’ll do it, I’ll do it tomorrow,” David snapped, and a pleasant crisp taste entered his mouth with the decision.
    â€œAnd I had thought, when Boyer’s men made the hay, it would be better if the barn doesn’t look like a rookery,” his mother added needlessly.
    A barn, in day, is a small night. The splinters of light between the dry shingles pierce the high roof like stars, and the rafters and crossbeams and built-in ladders seem, until your eyes adjust, as mysterious as the branches of a haunted forest. David entered silently, the gun in one hand.Copper whined desperately at the door, too frightened to come in with the gun yet unwilling to leave the boy. David stealthily turned, said “Go away,” shut the door on the dog, and slipped the bolt across. It was a door within a door; the double door for wagons and tractors was as high and wide as the face of a house.
    The smell of old straw scratched his sinuses. The red sofa, half hidden under its white-splotched tarpaulin, seemed assimilated into this smell, sunk in it, buried. The mouths of empty bins gaped like caves. Rusty oddments of farming—coils of baling wire, some spare tines for a harrow, a handleless shovel—hung on nails driven