Читать книгу The Way the Family Got Away - Michael Kimball - Страница 10

The men went from living room to bedroom and bedroom and bathroom to kitchen. The men went into and out of the rooms and into and out of our house. The men went back and forth between our house and their truck. They got the couch up between two of them and carried it out. One of them took the cushions. Another one of them carried a chair. Another one of them carried another chair. Their arms and the other parts of them were all large. They made the doorways small with themselves and the furniture they carried out of the rooms, away down the hallway, and out of our house—table, lamp, table and chairs, dresser and dresser, bed and bed and bed.

These and the even bigger things they carried out across the front yard—ice box, bathtub, bathroom sink, kitchen sink, the kitchen table and chairs. They carried out boxes full of other stuff and carried other stuff out that did not fit into boxes. They rolled the carpet up and rolled the carpet up and folded it over their shoulders and shouldered it up into the truck. They pulled the cupboards from the kitchen walls down. The floors they pulled up—all the tile and board.

They took the windows out of the walls and took the way we looked out of the windows away with them when they did that. They took the doors off the hinges and banged them shut inside the walls of their truck so that those closed doors left us outside but also opened the rest of America up for us.

The men pulled the stoop away from the front door and took that away with them too. All that stuff wasn’t ours anymore and their truck was packed. The men climbed up into the truck and into the truck and into the truck. They sat down in the chairs at the kitchen table and among themselves and all the insides of our house that they had carried out. The last one of them pulled down on the rope that rolled the truck’s rolling back door closed. He climbed up through the truck driver’s front door and drove the truck and all our stuff that was inside the truck away from our house in Mineola to somewhere else in America.

My mother and father and brother and sister along with the other and smaller things that we had left were all that we had left of us in that house of our family and stuff. My mother and father packed the suitcases, boxes, and crates up with the rest of the stuff that was still ours. My mother and father packed my brother up in his casket and packed his casket up in the trunk. My mother and father carried everything else out to the car and packed it up too. My mother and father packed my sister and me up with the rest of the stuff that we had left and we left too.