breath shuddered upward over his body.
He lifted his eyes toward the house and saw—nothing. Nothing but the heavenly tree forlornly genuflecting in the night air as it had done for twenty years. Where the house should have stood, its tin roof reflecting silver, Jolly could make out only a dark rectangle deep in the shagged carpet of weeds.
He scowled and shifted his direction toward where the barn should have been. Another dark rectangle; flat, dead. The water tower, too, and the windmill; they did not stand against the skyline as they should. The three peach trees—where were they? The pear tree from which he had flown and broken an arm—where was it?
Jolly sat on a granite boulder beside the road and with his chin on his hands surveyed the private ruin below him. It was not hard to re-silver the windmill so that it sparkled as it whirled water from low in the ground, or more likely, mud and bits of rotted gopher fur, because for the three hot summer months you had to haul drinking water in bellied iron barrels from some neighbor’s well if you could find a truck to borrow, and you carried pails of green water from the swamp, trip after trip, for Mama to heat on the cook stove for clothes washing and Saturday baths until the late summer gully-washers foamed into the valley from the mountains, inundating everything as they came, nearly always spreading out flat clear up to the foundation of the house and leaving a dead mule or a white-faced cow to be dragged away from the sloping pasture before the house.
It was easy to re-pink the fruit trees in April in hopes the blooms would not be bitten by late frost (except those twigs that stood in blue vases on the library table). If the blossoms survived the frost, the young fruit had only to survive a water-lean summer—and wash water was some help—and the cardinals and mockingbirds and the black and yellow finches and the buckshot from Jamie’s 20-gauge, and then they’d be ripe for picking. Nell Ann grumbled, but she preferred peeling any number of peaches to the risk of being blown to kingdom come by Mama’s formidable pressure cooker from whence emerged enough jars of preserved fruit to last the winter, provided the winter was short-lived.
It was not too hard to rebuild the barn. The single-gabled roof rose high overhead above the empty stalls on one side and above the molded hay piles and boxes of extra Mason jars and the worn tack on the other. It was in this barn that Jamie and Jolly killed Brown Bossy through the kindness of all the barley and mash she could eat, although she lived enough hours to give birth to Beauty, a spindly-legged calf who occupied a place of esteem about the barn for the months it took to wean her of the baby bottle. Directly above the spot where Bossy gave up the ghost ran a high beam the length of the barn on which you could see gray mice scurrying most any hour of the day, and if the season were right and you pestered them with clods of dry manure, they would drop the half-eaten bloody bodies of their pink babies down on your head as if to say, “Here, take them, you want them so bad, but leave us be.”
It would be harder to replant the yellow rose hedge that grew up one side of the path from the heavenly tree nearly to the front porch steps, although the nasturtium bed along the porch would riot again easily enough. It always had.
To rebuild the house itself would be next to impossible, because it would require the repossession from wherever they had been carted of each weathered plank, each rusted nail, every worn floorboard, every tin roof-patch (added at the rate of about four a year to discourage the flow of rain water inside the house). Once the materials were reassembled, the reconstruction of the house would be easier, because Jolly and Jamie and Nell Ann could tell you where every board went, how high every ceiling should be, how far it was from the back bedroom to the isinglass-eyed wood heater in the front room where
He lifted his eyes toward the house and saw—nothing. Nothing but the heavenly tree forlornly genuflecting in the night air as it had done for twenty years. Where the house should have stood, its tin roof reflecting silver, Jolly could make out only a dark rectangle deep in the shagged carpet of weeds.
He scowled and shifted his direction toward where the barn should have been. Another dark rectangle; flat, dead. The water tower, too, and the windmill; they did not stand against the skyline as they should. The three peach trees—where were they? The pear tree from which he had flown and broken an arm—where was it?
Jolly sat on a granite boulder beside the road and with his chin on his hands surveyed the private ruin below him. It was not hard to re-silver the windmill so that it sparkled as it whirled water from low in the ground, or more likely, mud and bits of rotted gopher fur, because for the three hot summer months you had to haul drinking water in bellied iron barrels from some neighbor’s well if you could find a truck to borrow, and you carried pails of green water from the swamp, trip after trip, for Mama to heat on the cook stove for clothes washing and Saturday baths until the late summer gully-washers foamed into the valley from the mountains, inundating everything as they came, nearly always spreading out flat clear up to the foundation of the house and leaving a dead mule or a white-faced cow to be dragged away from the sloping pasture before the house.
It was easy to re-pink the fruit trees in April in hopes the blooms would not be bitten by late frost (except those twigs that stood in blue vases on the library table). If the blossoms survived the frost, the young fruit had only to survive a water-lean summer—and wash water was some help—and the cardinals and mockingbirds and the black and yellow finches and the buckshot from Jamie’s 20-gauge, and then they’d be ripe for picking. Nell Ann grumbled, but she preferred peeling any number of peaches to the risk of being blown to kingdom come by Mama’s formidable pressure cooker from whence emerged enough jars of preserved fruit to last the winter, provided the winter was short-lived.
It was not too hard to rebuild the barn. The single-gabled roof rose high overhead above the empty stalls on one side and above the molded hay piles and boxes of extra Mason jars and the worn tack on the other. It was in this barn that Jamie and Jolly killed Brown Bossy through the kindness of all the barley and mash she could eat, although she lived enough hours to give birth to Beauty, a spindly-legged calf who occupied a place of esteem about the barn for the months it took to wean her of the baby bottle. Directly above the spot where Bossy gave up the ghost ran a high beam the length of the barn on which you could see gray mice scurrying most any hour of the day, and if the season were right and you pestered them with clods of dry manure, they would drop the half-eaten bloody bodies of their pink babies down on your head as if to say, “Here, take them, you want them so bad, but leave us be.”
It would be harder to replant the yellow rose hedge that grew up one side of the path from the heavenly tree nearly to the front porch steps, although the nasturtium bed along the porch would riot again easily enough. It always had.
To rebuild the house itself would be next to impossible, because it would require the repossession from wherever they had been carted of each weathered plank, each rusted nail, every worn floorboard, every tin roof-patch (added at the rate of about four a year to discourage the flow of rain water inside the house). Once the materials were reassembled, the reconstruction of the house would be easier, because Jolly and Jamie and Nell Ann could tell you where every board went, how high every ceiling should be, how far it was from the back bedroom to the isinglass-eyed wood heater in the front room where
Similar Books
