"Robert Reed - To Church With Mr. Multhiford" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

"Hey," I sputtered.

He handed me a length of pine and a dirty mess of hemp rope. "You make the F,"
he said. "That's your job."

"What F?" I asked.

"We took a vote. Take Me To Your Leader is too long." Probably true. "But if we
make four big letters --"

"What?!" I snapped. I mean, I'm a minister's son. There are things I can sort of
do, and things I can never do.

"But it won't take long," Charlie promised.

What started as clever vandalism was becoming something more ordinary, and if I
was caught, no doubt about it, my punishment was going to verge on the Eternal.

The guys started walking off into the corn.

When I didn't go with them, it was Lester who got sent back. "All you do is the
F," he argued, trying to sound reasonable. "Did Charlie even tell you what the
letters were?"

"I figured U, C, and K," I said. Somehow innocence didn't sound like an excuse.
"Unless you're going to spell farm or funk. Is that what we're doing here?"

Lester shook his head, disappointed with me. "If you want, stay with the truck."
He showed me a smile. One day he's going to be a killer salesman. "If Multhiford
shows, give us a couple warning honks."

For not, I was involved. And I didn't want to wait around for that old farmer.
That's why I followed the others, carrying my board and rope up close to my
body, walking between the rows of tall corn. We went a couple hundred yards into
the field, then huddled, deciding how to do it. "We need it seen from the air,"
Charlie kept saying, sketching FUCK in the soil. "Hundred foot letters. Think
they'll get noticed?"

Think they'll be easy? I thought. Cutting through the rows, I paced off what
felt like the right distance, then turned and started pushing over three rows at
once. I was using my pine board and my muscles, but the plants were sturdy,
fighting me all the way. I kept getting tired, kept losing my breath. I'd have
to stop and stand, my back aching, my ears humming, and after a few breaks like
that, the others had moved out ahead of me, and I couldn't feel more alone.

What I was doing felt wrong. Plain, simple wrong. And that feeling is what made
me tired, guilt having its way of sapping me. It wasn't particularly late, the
moon mostly full and hanging in the east, shining through a silvery haze. The
air inside the corn was still, like a breath being held. It tasted thick and
humid, full of living smells and weed killers. I was a town boy out where he