Читать книгу Saturday You Die - R. A. Lafferty - Страница 4

Besides being born (that is an ordeal, no less an ordeal because you forget it) the worst thing to be gone through is to be a new boy in a small Southern town.

There are reasons for this. First, the boys are tougher in the South. They go barefoot in April. They play with green snakes. They keep scorpions in fruit jars. They clang cow bells, and they pop whips. In the second place, all the boys are bigger than you are. But in the North they had all been your size.

Howard Glass, Stanely Savage, Clifford Welch, and that other boy whose name had not been learned yet, they were all bigger than Henry. Howard and Stanely would both go to school next year. Not only that, but Clifford and that other boy had already been to school, and next year they would be in the second grade.

So all the boys in town were bigger than Henry. And, though he would have been the last to admit it, they were all tougher too.

“If you ever tell anybody what we tell you we’ll throw you in the ditch at Carter Road and you won’t be able to get out,” Howard Glass said. “And nobody will find you until the weed-cutter comes along, and then all they’ll find is your bones.”

“I never tell anything,” Henry said steadfastly. “In all my life I never tell anything.”

The ditch at Carter Road was the deepest one in town and Henry didn’t know whether he’d be able to climb out of it or not. In the entire North there was nothing remotely like that ditch at Carter Road.

“Or else we’ll bury you in the cave,” said Howard Glass. “We have another cave under the floor of the first and we bury people there.”

They did have a cave in this new town. In the North they had only talked about caves but nobody had ever seen one.

Howard’s name was Glass, probably because he wore glasses, the only one besides grown people who ever did so. He had eyes as big as a cow’s. Clifford Welsh said that if Howard had his glasses off then his eyes wouldn’t be any bigger than anyone else’s, but there was no way to prove this. Howard always had his glasses on and they made him look like an owl. But they didn’t have owls here in the South. If they had, they were a different kind, and you wouldn’t know them for what they were.

And there is this about the South; it is larger than it is in the North. This is because more than half the trees had been cut down or had never been there; the grass was heavy green; and there was no snow left on the north side of the houses, and perhaps there had never been. The water came from crank-handle cisterns instead of pump-handle pumps; and more of the town people kept cows. The squirrels were grey instead of red. The trees were different. And they had new kinds of birds, like scissortails, that nobody had ever seen before. It was less cloudy, and the days were longer. You could see a great deal farther as both the earth and the sky were everywhere of more extent. Other people have noticed other differences between the North and the South, but it was Henry who discovered the essential difference: it is larger in the South.

“After you bury them in the cave, how long before you let them out?” Henry asked.

“How would we let them out? After you’re dead there’s nothing to let out.”

“Then you get to stay there all the time?”

“Sure. All the time. Except that the next Saturday we take you out again and cut you up.” Howard’s eyes were flecked green behind his glasses and were bigger than a cow’s. “Then we cut the flesh off you and put it in jars to sell for crawfish bait. And we put your bones in a box and bury them again.”

“But the first time you’re buried, it’s only for a week?”