excerpt
It was a Thursday, and he was confused when he saw his father’s car in front of the house at three o’clock when he got home from school. The downstairs rooms were empty, but as he came up into the gloom of the second floor hall, he could hear voices above him. He picked hers out at once, that sweet high tremulous soprano that had crooned above his nap-time year after year. Then Tomaso’s voice, and Will’s rich laughter. He raced up the stairs and burst into the kitchen, breathless and suddenly shy.
Hattie knelt and put her arms around him. He closed his eyes and felt her warmth, her tenderness, drank in the light lemony fragrance of her skin. When she released him he kissed her cheek. Will came over and held out his hand. Rick shook it fiercely, feeling the long fingers curl around his, the smooth, calloused palm.
After dinner, the men invited Rick to join them in the downstairs living room. They broke out their guitars. Tomaso struck a tuning fork against his thigh and held the stem to Will’s National steel, a small guitar made entirely of metal which he played with the long brown broken neck of a bottle. Rick took out his ukelele and tuned each string until its small sound dissolved into theirs.
They played for hours, stopping occasionally to sip from the pint of Cabin Still bourbon Will had smuggled by the ladies in his guitar case, or for he and Tomaso to smoke the thin cigarettes he rolled from a pouch of Bull Durham. They sang railroad songs and prison songs and delta blues and spirituals. Andrea came down once to announce that it was Rick’s bedtime, but he begged and pleaded so vehemently she agreed to leave him be.
He had his first taste of whisky then, and listened far into the night, to stories of his father’s youth, the years picking taters and cotton and apples and everything that grew, the railroad years, the war years they’d survived together, the bright lights of foreign cities, the fights in bars, the squandered paychecks and homesick evenings of shared letters and photos and plans for a future they might never see.
Rick looked up from the snapshots and his eyes were wet. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly to steady his voice before he asked his mother about the last line of their letter.
Libros Libertad 