Free The Uninnocent by Bradford Morrow Page B

to report across the roof of the veranda, and in the grass and trees surrounding the house. Jenny watched Georgia weep, drily.
    Now I always liked her, always will. Way she helped me clear Mama’s medicines, useless now without a patient, gather them up into a brown grocery sack, seal it with masking tape, and bury it under other garbage in the tin can out in the alley so the neighborhood children couldn’t rummage it up. Way she set to washing the dishes, which I dried, both of us dressed in our mourning blacks, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Way she had come over and held me in her arms, rocking gently, as the porch swing creaked. The way she let me take her by the hand and lead her out into the steady, light rain, around the side of the house, where the hollyhocks fell over themselves in their own abundance, into the kitchen through the back door. It was not a time to run into Cutts, was it, what with both of us in tears and him in his rage at not finding it? And the way Georgia would never ask me whether it was I who sent the letter. And also I felt assured that she would after all go back home with Cutts, because she hoped that in the passage of time I had in fact forgiven him, and how she could feel this was true because it was I who insisted I had forgiven him.
    But how the matter now would never really come to rest inside her. How it would gnaw at her and in the oddest moments come up, like a nausea, outrageous, insuppressible. Cutts would never again be able to run his hands over her, push himself inside her in quite the same way as he had in times past. That was over now. And as for Georgia, I was certain she surely preferred knowing this truth about him. She will go on home to Maryland with him and they will lie down at night in their warm bed after their long journey, but it won’t be Georgia asleep beside him. Not truly Georgia.
    She is standing next to me before the sink. Her long, delicate hands are pushing the sponge around the stained circle of a plate, as she stares hard into the soapy water. A real sister, the one I never had.
    All the while, the noise Cutts makes upstairs is growing more and more violent. His cursing filters down like a shower in a nightmare where the rain soaks its victim though it never actually gets him wet—however drenched in his own sweat he may be on awakening in his twisted bedclothes. Poor pathetic Cutts, the way he is going on up there, looking and looking. Let him break every stick of furniture, every memento, every bit of family history in that badly lit, hysterical attic.
    Let him shout. Let him grind his teeth.

AMAZING GRACE
    Whereas I was blind, now I see .
    â€”John 9:25
    T HE MIRACLE THAT RESTORED my sight, one winter morning, was a miracle that led to many desperate others. Who could have foreseen the catastrophes that followed this moment I had dreamed of for over a decade? The only blessing that accompanied the sudden, unexpected reversal of my blindness was this: I was alone when it happened. My wife was away shopping; the two children were out. Myself, I was in my humble study, listening to an old recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert’s Sonata in G Major. Thanks to Sarah, a fire crackled in the wood-burning stove, making my sanctum warm and dry—the room where I worked was an uninsulated extension added to the house in the months after my accident. A pot of nice fragrant cinnamon tea was on my desk, along with my braille Bible, some reference books also in braille, and my computer loaded with voice-synthesizing software I used to draft the many motivational speeches I gave touring the country. It has always struck me as ironic, although naturally I never mentioned it in my uplifting talks, that I made a far better living after the accident than when I was among the sighted. No one would have paid a plugged nickel to hear me speak before tragedy struck me down. Now I filled rented auditoriums and hotel convention halls, and my