Read Online The Sleeping Night by Barbara Samuel - Free Book Online

(that’s how she say it, like it’s in capital letters). He died a few years back. She’s old, but she’s sharp and I figure there isn’t too much she ain’t seen or heard. We have a good time. I take her cigarettes when I can, and my mama sent a batch of brownies a while back, so I took those, too. (Don’t tell Mama.) She brings me books and I been reading a lot. Just finished A Farewell to Arms, and it was a good book, though I still don’t like him much. What have you been reading these days? Anything good?
You asked if it was hard to be so far from home. No. I miss people, but I don’t miss Texas. It’s okay here. We work hard (just finished a CENSORED ), but I’m used to that.
There’s been terrible stories in the paper about the rest of Europe, things I don’t know if I can believe. Rumors about what Hitler’s doing to the Jews, mainly, but they’re so bad—I just don’t know. There’s sick people on this earth, that’s for sure.
    I gotta get to work now and mail this. Tell your daddy I said hey. You take good care of him now. Drag him to the doctor if you have to. Write and tell me what happens. I think about y’all a lot, specially since I knew without you telling me how bad you always wanted to go to England. I never did. Funny.
Your friend, Isaiah
PS If you wanted to send things, I’d take them to Mrs. Wentworth. Food of any kind, of course, anything you can ship. Tea if you can get it. These folks are living on little enough. Thank you.

— 10 —
     
    Angel made her way to Mrs. Pierson’s house that afternoon. It was one of her favorite places on earth—gentility embroidered in every detail. The house burrowed near a grove of pines just past the southern edge of Gideon proper, a rambling, two-story clapboard painted white. Around the wide, low porch were planted roses in a dozen colors, yellow and red and white and combinations of all three. The blooms stained the air with a heady fragrance that mixed with the melon scent of grass from the lawns that spread luxuriously beneath the shade of pecan and sycamore trees. As if in anticipation of the coming heat, a handful of chairs were gathered in a cove beneath the thickest branches.
    The house had been built at the turn of the century with invention money. That’s how people always said it: “invention money.” Nobody seemed to know exactly what had been invented, patented and sold for resultant fortunes, only that it had something to do with electrics and kitchens. Having made his fortune, the first Donald Pierson had settled his wife and son in the big white house and proceeded to write scholarly pieces for magazines nobody in Gideon ever read.
    His son had traveled east for his education just before the Great War and turned to war reporting as soon as he finished his degree, hoping to make a name for himself. Instead, he’d been shot in France and returned to New York.
    There, recovering, he’d met and married the present Mrs. Pierson, a refugee from somewhere in Eastern Europe. They traveled back to the family home in the midst of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The younger Mr. Pierson, weakened by his wounds, succumbed to the virus shortly thereafter, leaving his worldly possessions to his lovely, young and frightened wife. The elder Mrs. Pierson, bereaved beyond comfort at the loss of her only son, died shortly thereafter.
    Gideon’s citizens, suspicious of strangers to begin with, certainly weren’t crazy about a foreigner in their midst, no matter how pretty she was. They clucked over her accent, speculated over the scandal of that young woman living in that big house with the odd inventor and circulated rumors of all sorts to explain her blindness.
    Just as matters had nearly driven Mrs. Pierson insane, Angel’s mother had arrived, been wooed and married by Parker in less than three weeks. And the gossip machine whirred violently, changing direction.
    Because of their outcast status, the two women had naturally become friends,