"Tom Easton - Unto the Last Generation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

across the glass.

He was entirely bald, with just one remaining tuft, gray and greasy, dangling down the back of his neck.
Grizzled fur, kept short by hacking with a knife, covered his cheeks and chin and upper lip. Around its
edges, his skin was pink and scaly.

Ma was nearly bald, for though hair sprouted all over her head, it was sparse and thin, and her
red-splotched scalp showed through. Both were thin, their bodies worn, their faces etched by a lifetime
of deprivation so unremitting that it was accepted routine, normal, almost beyond despair.

A sudden draft cut through the pervasive reek of mildew. Smoke belched from the stone fireplace, and
Ma coughed again. Something rolled across the roof. Something else flapped and pounded. Rain
thundered on the battered sheet metal above their heads. The water drip became a stream.

Uncle Alva, as thin and worn as Ma and Pa, his beard longer and darker, touched the bucket with a toe
to center the stream. "There's better houses out there."

"Worse, too," said Pa. "Empty cellar holes."

"Haunted, most of 'em," said Ma.

"Tighter roofs."

"Not many," said Ma. "I've seen 'em, and those old shingles just go to mush."

"Not all of 'em. Some have metal roofs."

"So do we," said Pa. "And I built this place. Ain't leaving it."
"I built the ell, and it ain't leakin'. It's got a floor too."

No one looked down at the layers of damp carpets that were all that covered the bare rock beneath. Pa
had chosen his house site because that rock was there, a long stretch of ancient pavement that arched
from side to side. Only when the storms were long and furious did water cover the land and sneak in
beneath the walls. Most of the time, all that got in came in through the roof.

Felix tried to ignore the adults. He huddled on the end of the sway-backed sofa beside the potato barrels
and stared at the door. To one side hung an ancient clock that was rarely wound and whose tale of hours
no one missed. The family counted time by dawns and sunsets. To the other, his broad-brimmed hat and
long cloak hung with all the others. If the storm would only run its course, even if the usual overcast went
with it and let the sun shine bright and youveeful, he could get out, hat and all, and find.... He shook his
head and scratched at the rash on his arm. He did not know what he wanted to find. He did know it
wasn't in this shack.

"Don't scratch, boy," said Ma. "It don't help any." Then, as if she had caught the itch from him like a
yawn, she too dug at her arm.

His cousin Ox sat beside him. Ox was a year younger but larger and heavier and less prone to fidgets.
Instead of looking at door and hats and windows, he watched Uncle Alva and Ma and Pa. From time to
time he glanced toward the doorway to the ell Alva had constructed for the two of them to live in. It was
just as tight as the man had claimed. The evidence of its floor was the foot that separated the doorway's