Отрывок из книги
ALSO BY RICK BRAGG
All Over but the Shoutin’
.....
The cost of the war—and of the local economic recovery—would not be known for some time, when the first casualties started appearing in the newspaper. “We had kin lost in the war,” Jerry Lee recalls. “Paul Batey got killed. A sniper got him,” in the Pacific. “My Aunt Viola never got over that. The war took a whole lot of people from here.” But for the children, safe in the low country, the war was a thing of adventure, where Germans could be killed with slingshots and Japanese fell from paper planes. The river was said to be a thing of great strategic importance, as it had since the Yankees took Vicksburg, but now it was said to be a target for sabotage, because of the freight it carried for the war effort. So the boys watched from the bank for saboteurs and submarines. It was what he did instead of going to school; it was a patriotic duty.
“Mama and Daddy seen their kid had school,” he says, but he did not always make it inside the door. He would walk off in that direction, till he was out of sight, then just go wandering, to fish or swim or throw rocks or sit and listen to an old man whup a guitar, because it was so hard to sit there in those little bitty desks and try to learn about fractions and what made the sky blue and the names of all those men in puffy pantaloons, when there was great time wasting to be done, pool halls to sneak into, barbershops to linger by. And so he just did not go often to Ferriday Elementary and hoped the teachers would just pass him through, something teachers have done since the advent of chalk. His daddy made the mistake of buying him an old motor scooter, which only increased his range. “It was a great time,” he says. “Every now and then a plane would fly over, and we’d go hide under the bridge.”
.....
