The Testimony by Laura London

Author:Laura London
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Romance - Contemporary, Fiction / Romance - Erotica, Fiction / Sagas
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Jesse’s parents had resided in the South Side neighborhood of Pigsville since their arrival in Milwaukee in 1957. “Yeah,” Jesse loved to tell people, “I’m from Pigsville.” It was a unique area, isolated like the land time forgot in a dwarf valley that only the initiated knew how to find by threading through the potholed lanes of industrial Milwaukee, past a truck dealership, and then plunging down, down a spiraling blacktop road flanked by high airy grasses and buttercups.

An old railroad yard bounded Pigsville to the north, the forbidden playground where Jesse and his brothers had spent their Saturdays inventing elaborate games inside the decrepit sidelined boxcars and observing the constant shuffling of full ones. Just beyond the rail yard, a brewery rose like a massive red-brick cliff, puffing its roast-corn aroma of malt deliciously into the little valley. And not thirty feet from the back bedroom Jesse had shared with nine brothers, a colossal concrete pillar shot upward to support the high slab of an interstate freeway, as sturdy and awe producing as one of Goliath’s legs. WELCOME TO PIGSVILLE and PIGSVILLE IS BEST, announced ancient spray-painted messages on the pillar, greeting Jesse and Christine as they pulled up to join the herd of cars in front of his parents’ house on Sunday morning.

The freeway would block in shade toward noon, but it was still early enough for creamy sunlight; and it was quiet enough to hear the robins sing because the cement pillars seemed to capture and drown the city sounds from the sharp bluffs above. Only the Ludans’ tar-papered bungalow showed signs of activity. The little cottages and raised-basement houses slumbered on. A tabby cat meowed its way through the chicory patch underneath a rowboat up on cinder blocks in a neighbor’s yard. Plantain and pineapple weeds grew lushly in the little plots, and here and there lay an inexplicable dirt heap. Spring plantings of geraniums and petunias were already beginning to brighten everyone’s window boxes. Good-naturedly inadequate, robustly unpretentious, Pigsville had a way of seeming to delight in its own lack of gloss.

Pigsville. Jesse, one of the few people to have researched the subject, had found that the area was named Pigsville either because of a Mr. George Pigg, who was rumored to have lived in the valley a hundred years ago, or because the valley was the site of a farm that had once raised that useful animal.

As Christine was unloading a picnic basket from the backseat and Jesse was pulling a cooler of beer from the trunk, a series of yelled numbers exploded from behind the bungalow, and a six-foot-tall red-and-yellow package of french fries came running around the side of the house into the front yard. In this ingenious costume were housed four of Jesse’s brothers and one sister, ages twelve to sixteen, wearing nodding french fry hats and doing their best to run in synchronization. They were doing pretty well until one of the front french fries saw Jesse and stopped

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