A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash

Author:Wiley Cash [Cash, Wiley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781611734478
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

MY EYES WERE HEAVY AND SLEEPY WHEN MY GRANDPA CAME INTO the room. I felt him sit down on the bed, and I could smell the cigarette smoke in his clothes.

“You asleep, buddy?” he whispered.

“No,” I said. He was quiet, and I laid there and waited for him to say something else. I liked the way the smoke smelled on him and it made me wish Daddy smoked too.

“I hate all this happened today,” he said. “I hate that you’re having to go through all this.”

I opened up my eyes all the way and looked down at the bottom of the bed where he sat. The light was on in the hallway, and I could just barely see his face and the outline of his body.

“When are my mom and dad coming home?” I asked him.

“They’ll be home tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe even before you wake up for school. They’ve got to take care of your brother tonight.” He looked like he thought about saying something else, but he didn’t. He probably figured I wouldn’t understand. I could’ve told him that I understood plenty. I could’ve told him that I understood that the ambulance was on its way to Miss Lyle’s house to get Stump and that its siren wasn’t on because they knew he was already dead, and I understood that he was probably at the hospital with Mama and Daddy and a whole bunch of doctors trying to figure out what happened to him. He would’ve known how much I understood if he’d known what me and Joe Bill had seen.

My grandpa reached out his hand and patted mine through the sheet. “Good night,” he said. He started to stand up.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked him.

He stood up straight and looked down at me. “Out on the porch,” he said.

“I mean, where’ve you been all this time?” I said. “How come me and Stump ain’t never seen you before?” I knew Mama would get mad at me for asking him that, but she wasn’t there so I went ahead and asked him anyway. He sat down real slow and stared at the bedroom door like he was waiting for somebody else to walk through it. He sighed, and I could tell he didn’t want to have to answer a question like that.

“Well,” he said, “if you’ve really got to know, I’ve been all over the place. I spent a couple years driving a rig up and down the coast, hung drywall for a while, worked in a mill up in PA.”

“What’s PA?” I asked him.

“Pennsylvania,” he said.

“But why have you been gone so long?”

“I just have,” he said. “I just went away.”

“Why?”

He sat there quiet like he was thinking hard about what he wanted to say next, and then I saw his head turn like he was looking at me over his shoulder. “Because sometimes we do things we can’t take back, and we need to go away and leave folks alone and let them forget us for a while.

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