Deadeye Dick Read Online Free

The train began to move immediately. The sun went down. There were no stars, no moon that night. America was blackness and
clackety-clack
.
    How do I know what the night was like? Gino and Marco Maritimo, as old men, both told me so.
    •   •   •
    Somewhere in the seamless darkness, which may have been West Virginia, Gino and Marco were joined by four American hoboes, who at knife-point took their suitcases, their coats, their hats, and their shoes.
    They were lucky they didn’t have their throats slit for fun. Who would have cared?
    •   •   •
    How they wished that their peepholes would close! But the nightmare went on and on. And then it became a daymare. The train stopped several times, but in the midst
of
such ugliness that Gino and Marco could not bring themselves to step out into it, to somehow start living there. But then two railroad detectives with long clubs made them get out anyway, and, like it or lump it, they were on the outskirts of Midland City, Ohio, on the other side of Sugar Creek from the center of town.
    They were terribly hungry and thirsty. They could either await death, or they could invent something to do. They invented. They saw a conical slate roof on the other side of the river, and they walked toward that. In order to keep putting one foot in front of the other, they pretended that it was of utmost importance that they reach that structure and no other.
    They waded across Sugar Creek, rather than draw attention to themselves on the bridge. They would have swum the creek, if it had been that deep.
    And now here they were, as astonished as my mother had been to see a young man all dressed in scarlet and silver, with a sable busby on his head.
    When Father looked askance at the two of them from his seat under the oak, Gino, the younger of the brothers,but their leader, said in Italian that they were hungry and would do any sort of work for food.
    Father replied in Italian. He was good with languages. He was fluent in French and German and Spanish, too. He told the brothers that they should by all means sit down and eat, if they were as hungry as they appeared to be. He said that nobody should ever be hungry.
    He was like a god to them. It was so easy for him to be like a god to them.
    After they had eaten, he took them up into the attic above the loft, the future gun room. There were two old cots up there. Light and air came from windows in a cupola at the peak of the roof. A ladder, its bottom bolted to the center of the attic floor, led up into the cupola. Father told the brothers that they could make the attic their home, until they found something better.
    He said he had some old shoes and sweaters and so on, if they wanted them, in his trunks below.
    He put them to work the next day, ripping out the stalls and tack room.
    And no matter how rich and powerful the Maritimo brothers subsequently became, and no matter how disreputable and poor Father became, Father remained a god to them.

    4
    A ND SOMEWHERE in there, before America entered the First World War against the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, Father’s parents had their peepholes closed by carbon monoxide from a faulty heating system in their farmhouse out near Shepherdstown.
    So Father became a major stockholder in the family business, the Waltz Brothers Drug Company, to which he had contributed nothing but ridicule and scorn.
    And he attended stockholders’ meetings in a beret and a paint-stained smock and sandals, and he brought old August Gunther along, claiming Gunther was his lawyer, and he protested that he found his two uncles and their several sons, who actually ran the business, intolerably humorless and provincial and obsessed by profits, and so on.
    He would ask them when they were going to stop poisoning their fellow citizens, and so on. At that time, the uncles and cousins were starting the first chain of drugstores in the history of the country, and they