Free The Cove by Ron Rash Page A

despite his mother and uncles telling him not to. When Paul had finished signing the forms, the first thing he did was salute Chauncey. It had been all he could do not to shed a tear, especially since Paul had been one of the first to join Chauncey’s chapter of the Boys Working Reserve.
    He slowly crossed the floor and passed through the doors. If he went home soused, his father would be displeased and his mother would cry, so Chauncey decided to go to the recruiting office instead. After a few stabs at the key hole, he got inside and turned on the electric light. The black letters on the eye chart bobbed a few moments before resettling in their proper positions. Chauncey sat down at his desk and placed his brow on his forearms as the nausea came again. He tried to be perfectly still, his breaths mere sips of air that went no farther than the top of his lungs. He imagined his insides a froth of foul water that had to be calmed. It helped and he began to feel better.
    He opened the desk’s bottom drawer and took out his speech for the next jubilee. It was a bully speech, one the governor of North Carolina himself would be proud to give. Which was no surprise because Chauncey had always been good with words. At the bank, he’d been able to sit down with men three times his age and convince them that their money was better off in Feith Savings and Loan than hidden in a tin can, or explain why a mortgage was the best way to secure a loan. Chauncey had always found the words to assuage their concerns, just as he did now with parents and wives and sometimes the recruits themselves.
    The tower bell chimed eight times before Chauncey felt sober enough to go home. A headache was forming like a thundercloud, but before it erupted an idea came to him. He’d show Estep and Meachum and every other person in Mars Hill that Sergeant Chauncey Feith could lead by example as well as words. He’d show them he could lead not just a troop of boys but a whole community. When Paul Clayton got out of the hospital, he’d have the best homecoming of any soldier in the whole state.

Chapter Seven
    W ednesday morning after the men went to the pasture, Laurel stood before the books on the makeshift shelf. She ran her index finger down each one. Keep reading and studying them, Miss Calicut had told her that long-ago September when school started again, that way you can stay caught up until enough parents realize how silly they’re acting. By then your father may be sprier too. Even with all the meanness she had endured from other pupils, Miss Calicut had made school the best place Laurel had ever known. Everywhere in the classroom there was something special—on the back wall a map of the United States and around it pictures of a beach in Florida with white sand and a blue ocean, a field of purple wildflowers in Nebraska, another of buildings in New York so tall they were called skyscrapers, another of an orange canyon in Texas. There’d been a globe in the room and Laurel could spin it and the whole world pass before her, each continent a different color. Miss Calicut had a big table next to her desk too, and on it were boxes with pretty rocks and a glass case with butterflies and moths. Real American and North Carolina flags stood by the doorway and beside them a shelf you could pick a book from to borrow over a weekend. Even now, sixteen years later, Laurel had seen more of the world in that one classroom than anywhere outside it.
    Miss Calicut had been young and pretty and she knew all sorts of interesting things about different places, like what people wore and ate, and if the country had mountains or deserts and what kinds of animals lived there. When Miss Calicut read books aloud like Anne of Green Gables and Great Expectations , she changed her voice for the different people in the book and it seemed you knew those people in the realest sort of way. Miss Calicut was always bringing in a plant or bug and once