Reading Online Novel

Living Witness(2)



Annie-Vic leaned over and checked the laces on her running shoes. She did not run—she was ninety-one, and she hadn’t even liked to run when she was at Vassar; it was a new thing, this driving need to race about everywhere and be athletic—but she did walk every day, up and down Main Street if she were in town. In Mongolia she had not walked because she had hiked every day with her group, but on another AAVC trip, to China, she had risen every morning and paced three or four times around her hotel. The Chinese police were not happy with the idea of an American walking around the streets on her own, for what looked to be no reason of any kind at all.

There were people on Main Street who were waiting for her and Annie-Vic knew it. They’d waited for her when she’d come home on her first vacation from college. In those days it was strange for a girl to go to college at all. It was an affront that a girl would go away to a place like Vassar, which was for people who were richer than the Hadleys were, for people who were not Folks. It was important to almost everybody in Snow Hill to be Just Folks. Annie-Vic had always wondered if they had waited for her on Main Street when they found out that she wasn’t coming home after college, that she had enlisted in the Navy instead. That was in 1937, and four short years later America was at war. That time, Annie-Vic had managed to stay away for damned near a decade. She still thought of it as the happiest time of her life, in spite of the fact that she’d spent two years of it in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

“Asinine,” she said again. Then she started off down the sidewalk, moving more quickly than most people twenty years younger than she was could have managed, staring straight ahead as she did. The people who were waiting for her were not going to slow her down, or change her mind. If they weren’t all boneheaded stupid, they’d know it.

The first stretch of Main Street was clear of people. It was a working day in the middle of the week, and most of the people who lived in Snow Hill were away at jobs in Harrisburg. Yes, Annie-Vic thought, even Snow Hill was changing. Even Snow Hill couldn’t stay stuck in the mud of provincial ignorance forever, although it sure as Hell intended to try. Annie-Vic was an imposing figure, and she knew it. She was tall for a woman, even these days, and so spare she could have served as a flagpole with very little alteration. Her arms and legs pumped, the way she had been taught to make them in the cardiovascular health class she’d taken at the community college. Her hair was thick and wild and gray as dirt. Her eyes were clear of cataracts and in no need of glasses except when she wanted to read. Her spine was as straight as a metal rod.

“Use it or lose it,” she whispered to herself, under her breath.

That was just the moment she was coming up on the Snow Hill Diner, and on Alice McGuffie, standing right outside.

“Filthy little bitch,” Alice McGuffie said, in a voice loud enough to carry all up and down the street. “You’re going to burn in Hell.”



2



Nicodemus Frapp saw Alice McGuffie come out onto Main Street just as old Miss Hadley was about to pass, and he knew—even standing all the way up at the other end of town—that it was not a situation likely to end in an exchange of “Good mornings.” At least, it wasn’t going to end that way for Alice. Annie-Vic was polite to a fault. She was polite in that way that highly educated, highly sophisticated people often were, with such a meticulous dedication to detail that she seemed to be insulting you in a way you couldn’t put your finger on. It was the kind of ability Nick had envied endlessly when he was growing up. He had even envied it in old Miss Hadley, since he had grown up in Snow Hill. Now he knew that it was not the kind of thing he would ever be able to do, and that it wouldn’t be good for him if he could. There were people in his congregation who thought Nick was highly educated himself. He’d been “away at school” long enough to have figured out the difference between the Oral Roberts University and Vassar.

Main Street was bright and hard this morning. It was too cold for this late in the winter. Nick watched Annie-Vic on her walk, the upright posture, the heel-to-toe “power foot” execution. He’d grown up in the hills. His people were miners and farmers. His own father hadn’t lasted but a few months past his fiftieth birthday. Nick could remember himself coming down to school every day with his lunch packed into a plastic beach bucket. All the hill kids had beach buckets to carry their lunches in, because the buckets went on sale cheap at Kmart at the end of the summer, and because it was much too expensive to buy lunch at the cafeteria at school. Nick was willing to bet that Annie-Vic had been able to buy her lunch when she was in elementary school, or—if the cafeteria didn’t exist yet; Nick was only thirty-six; some parts of the town’s social history still confused him—able to walk home and have it served to her by her mother. Nick’s own mother had had a job at a package store most of the time he was growing up. The package store would have killed her, if his father hadn’t gotten around to doing it to her first.