Read Online The Given Day by Dennis Lehane - Free Book Online Page B

Ain't in West Virginia or Kentucky neither." "Then where's it at?"
    "Tulsa."
    "Oklahoma?"
    "Uh- huh," she said, her voice soft, like she'd been planning it for a while and wanted to be subtle about letting him think he made up his own mind.
    "Shit, woman." Luther rubbed the outsides of her arms. "I ain't going to no Oklahoma."
    "Where you going to go then? Next door?"
    "What's next door?" He looked over there.
    "Ain't no jobs. That's all I know about next door."
    Luther gave that some thought, feeling her circling him, like she was more than a few steps ahead.
    "Baby," she said, "Ohio ain't done nothing for us but keep us poor."
    "Didn't make us poor."
    "Ain't going to make us rich."
    They were sitting on the swing he'd built on what remained of the porch where Cornelius had taught him what amounted to his trade. Two-thirds of the porch had washed away in the floods of '13, and Luther kept meaning to rebuild it, but there'd been so much baseball and so much work the last few years, he hadn't found the time. And it occurred to him--he was flush. It wouldn't last forever, Lord knows, but he did have some money put away for the first time in his life. Enough to make a move in any case.
    God, he liked Lila. Not so's he was ready to see the preacher and sell all of his youth quite yet; hell, he was only twenty-three. But he sure liked smelling her and talking to her and he sure liked the way she fit into his bones as she curled alongside of him in the porch swing.
    "What's in this Greenwood 'sides your aunt?"
    "Jobs. They got jobs all over the place. A big, hopping town with nothing but coloreds in it, and they all doing right well, baby. Got themselves doctors and lawyers, and the men own their own fine automobiles and the girls dress real nice on Sundays and everyone owns their own home."
    He kissed the top of her head because he didn't believe her but he loved that she wanted to think something should be so bad that half the time she convinced herself it could be.
    "Yeah, uh?" He chuckled. "They got themselves some white folk that work the land for them, too?"
    She reached back and slapped his forehead and then bit his wrist. "Damn, woman, that's my throwing hand. Watch that shit."
    She lifted his wrist and kissed it and then she laid it between her breasts and said, "Feel my tummy, baby."
    "I can't reach."
    She slid up his body a bit, and then his hand was on her stomach and he tried to go lower but she gripped his wrist.
    "Feel it."
    "I'm feeling it."
    "That's what else is going to be waiting in Greenwood."
    "Your stomach?"
    She kissed his chin.
    "No, fool. Your child."
    They took the train from Columbus on the first of October, crossed eight hundred miles of country where the summer fields had traded their gold for furrows of night frost that melted in the morning and dripped over the dirt like cake icing. The sky was the blue of metal that'd just come off the press. Blocks of hay sat in dun-colored fields, and Luther saw a pack of horses in Missouri run for a full mile, their bodies as gray as their breath. And the train streamed through it all, shaking the ground, screaming at the sky, and Luther huffed his breath into the glass and doodled with his finger, drew baseballs, drew bats, drew a child with a head too big for its body.
    Lila looked at it and laughed. "That's what our boy gonna look like? Big old head like his daddy? Long skinny body?"
    "Nah," Luther said, "gonna look like you."
    And he gave the child breasts the size of circus balloons and Lila giggled and swatted his hand and rubbed the child off the window.
    The trip took two days and Luther lost some money in a card game with some porters the first night, and Lila stayed mad about that well into the next morning, but otherwise Luther was hard-pressed coming up with a time he'd cherished more in his life. There'd been a few plays here and there on the diamond, and he'd once gone to Memphis when he was seventeen with his cousin, Sweet George, and they'd had