Other Voices, Other Rooms

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF Back Cover: The widely heralded bestseller that brought TRUMAN CAPOTE world acclaim. A mouldering mansion by the edge of a swamp. . . A ghostly face at a curtained window. . . A lonely boy seeking the answer to a long-buried secret. . . He'd come to stay with a father he had never seen, a father who had deserted him at birth. Everyone Joel Knox met was mysteriously close-mouthed about the place at Skully's Landing. But none were more tight-lipped than the people who bid him welcome to the dismal run-down mansion that was to be his home. None more evasive than his newfound stepmother when Joel asked to see the man who had sent for him after so many silent years. A tremendously engrossing novel of the modern South,Other Voices, Other Rooms is a masterful evocation of a time, a place and a mood. . . a book which is as terrifying as it is compelling. "Not only a work of unusual beauty, but a work of unusual intelligence. . . One of the most accomplished of American novelists." -- New York Herald Tribune FOR NEWTON ARVIN The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Jeremiah17:9 COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY TRUMAN CAPOTE All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced without permission. For information address Random House, Inc., 457 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York. Published as a SIGNET BOOK by arrangement with Random House, Inc., who have authorized this softcover edition. FIRST PRINTING, JANUARY, 1949 EIGHTH PRINTING, NOVEMBER, 1963 SIGNET TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES REGISTERED TRADEMARK -- MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.. SIGNET BOOKS are published by The New American Library of World Literature, Inc. 501 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Part One 1 Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no buses or trains heading in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies in the next-door town of Paradise Chapel: occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Radclif. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brand new cars pretty fast; and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country; and here in the swamplike hollows where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head, there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark marsh water like drowned corpses; often the only movement on the landscape is winter smoke winding out the chimney of some sorry-looking farmhouse, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling over the black deserted pinewoods. Two roads pass over the hinterlands into Noon City; one from the north, another from the south; the latter, known as the Paradise Chapel Highway, is the better of the pair, though both are much the same: desolate miles of swamp and field and forest stretch along either route, unbroken except for scattered signs advertising Red Dot 5¢ Cigars, Dr. Pepper, NEHI, Grove's Chill Tonic, and 666. Wooden bridges spanning brackish creeks named for long-gone Indian tribes rumble like far-off thunder under a passing wheel; herds of hogs and cows roam the roads at will; now and then a farm-family pauses from work to wave as an auto whizzes by, and watch sadly till it disappears in red dust. One sizzling day in early June the Turpentine Company's driver, Sam Radclif, a big balding six-footer with a rough, manly face, was gulping a beer at the Morning Star Café in Paradise Chapel