Читать книгу Over the Spiked Picket Fence - Angela Aloisio Sander & Denvil Buchanan - Страница 8

quiet street scattered with shady poinsettia trees bursting with bright red and orange bloom. I knew then that I would have had to get away from this valley of my childhood. This place was a rolling-calf in the dead of night when its chains clanked to the beat of the restless spirits coming down from Cemetery. These spirits would call out from their groves for the weary and lonely to come join them in the place of eternal rest. Come home, come home – ye who are weary come home – Good night- good night –good night.

I was determined to run far away from this place, to turn my back for good on the stories of my father, Mr. Selwyn Green, a man whom I had heard about through the whisper of the old men in the bar with the juke-box by the corner at the foot of sleepy Shelly- Hill across from Cemetery Corner. What a great place to tell tales, looking over at the yard with the mango tree, and the goats and donkeys feasting upon the shrubs growing over the bones of the dead.

They said that I was a bastard, that people were unsure about who my father really was, that a boy like me would most likely amount to nothing, just like my rumored worthless father before me. Speaking for myself, I had known no love that I could see from my foster mother who had only seemed to care about the few paltry government dollars delivered to the post office every month-end by the red Royal Mail van as it limped into town along the hot and dusty road, a pittance from the government for my care. The money was for flour, mixed-meal, rice, cod-fish, sugar and such-de-like.

And now here I was standing in this new great white city of dreams with its shimmering yellow lights, I Dan, happened upon the fair and the beautiful. I was here, the new man in hog-town, the city of endless dream, the country-man that I was, I had to take my chances. Instinctively I really wanted to touch her smooth looking hands, to feel if they were real. She did not respond to my hello. How could she, I being a stranger? But I was close enough to see what I thought was a strange desire in her eyes, a stranger standing alone on this

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