A Tidewater Morning by William Styron

Author:William Styron [Styron, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2008-05-31T07:00:00+00:00

A TIDEWATER MORNING

During the late summer of 1938, there was black news of the onrushing war. I had just turned thirteen, and I had a newspaper route that carried me on foot up and down the hot, sycamore-lined streets of our little village on the banks of the James River in Tidewater Virginia. I folded the papers into cylinders, forty-five or fifty of them, and stuffed them into a dingy white canvas bag that I lugged around with a strap that at first cut painfully into my shoulder, then eased up about a third of the way through my afternoon trek, which took about an hour and a half. The banner headlines that summer were tall and thick with harsh alarm: HITLER THREATENS. GERMAN TROOPS MASSING. CZECHOSLOVAKIA menaced. The news caused me less fear, really, than a vague, visceral excitement, distracting me from the gloom that encompassed me, from the ache that swelled in my stomach whenever I thought of my mother and her illness. And that thought always returned with a queasy jolt. I was also nagged by a worry having to do with my body: my nipples had become exquisitely tender, sensitive to the touch of the inside of my shirt and to my nervous, examining fingers, and the horrible fantasy flashed off and on in my mind that I might be turning, at least partially, into a girl. I fretted over other matters—over the length and tedium of the paper route, which I had commenced in the jazzed-up high spirits of anyone at his first paid professional employment but which had now lost most of its savor, and over my pay: $2.50 a week for nine hours, including an extra tour of duty overloaded at dawn with the fat editions of Sunday. Even during the Depression this was paltry recompense, and it was doled out dime by dime, nickel by nickel, by the only consummately mean-spirited person among the many frail and imperfect characters who floated in and out of my early youth.

Mr. Quigley—I have forgotten or blanked out his first name—was the proprietor of Quigley’s Store, an all-purpose emporium that stood on a barren tract of land just east of the village. It was a squat, nondescript place made of brick painted a bleached blue with a squeaking screen door and two windows nearly opaque with dust where one neon sign, reading pabst blue ribbon, pulsed spiritlessly, and the other, reading schlitz, was permanently dark. I imagine that if one could smell a Hogarth drawing, it would smell of gin; the interior of Quigley’s Store, Hogarthian in its dim clutter and squalor, smelled of spilled beer, cigarette smoke, and unwashed floors. After four o'clock a flock of shipyard workers gathered there every weekday afternoon to knock down bottles of beer at the round metal-topped tables in the rear of the store; they were a sullen lot, mostly displaced North Carolinians who had come to the area to make a few desperately needed shipyard dollars, and they

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.