Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah

Author:Barry Hannah [Hannah, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Southern Gothic, Mystery & Crime
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2001-08-02T12:00:00+00:00

Roman fished long and guiltily because Bernice did not want him home fretting about her condition. She’d lost some weight and looked even more Indian now. Perhaps the last trace of the Natchez tribe. He was another sort of Indian partly, Chickasaw, lost in the South.

Melanie was on his mind, how she was doing. He hadn’t fished close to her house for a while. She was a friend in a panic to live, and he didn’t want to be her instructor. Life itself was not much of an instructor but more like the fits of a runaway child. It would shock you with depravity and staggering kindness within the same hour. If you could get used to that, you might learn, but life itself didn’t especially want to follow up on anything.

It was his own time alone with his memories. The wash through the head, a wash of half-stories, peace and war. No screaming or banging or outer noise, just this steady action, floats of rooms and lamps, rolling of women like happy seabirds riding the first of the storm waves. No radio, no beer, but you sat there on a bucket and collected them all.

Nobody had the right to touch the stories, the pictures, the silence. That was your due. Nobody could enter. No government was here. No phone calls, no mail, no knocks on the door. You saw old men on benches and you pitied them for all bereft, but you were wrong. They had the time of their life. The deaf ones even more so. Inside and away. They were inside a pure dream.

Roman resembled his grandfather on his mother’s side, a man struck blind by a train in his sixties. The old man sat in the chair grinning. Roman couldn’t recall a whine or complaint from him. As if he had crashed up safe somewhere, the water of an ocean bathing his feet. You would go to him for a memory and he spoke it.

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