Michael Malone - Weebly

snapped. She was walking back through the Madder
section of town, where the stores and working people
noisily knocked up against one another. (As A.A.
Hayes had once written in the Dingley Day, "Leisurely
trees and grassy quietness have become costly; only the
urban rich and the rural poor can afford time and space
anymore." Reading which, William Bredforet had
remarked to his wife, "Joke to think that your
grandfather's paper is in the hands of a Johnny Reb
Socialist drunk now." And it would have been a shock
to Daniel Highwick, capitalist, abolitionist, and
teetotaler.)
Here on Three Branch Road, near what had once
been shacks and was now the trailer park, Polly's
father, Cecil, had grown up in one of the crowded brick
row houses. Since he'd first pointed his old home out to
her, she had come to look at it a number of times. The
narrow, cracked stone steps and grimy bricks held a
sad magic for her—a sweet, sharp rush of pity to think
of her father, skinny, unfashionably dressed, coming
down those steps with his violin case on a cold morning
to walk to school, where the other boys had once