Читать книгу Above the Waterfall - Ron Rash - Страница 13

Seven

The smell of a room soaked in long silences, dusty quilts and mothballs, linger of linseed oil and mildew. My grandparents’ bedroom had been much the same, even the mattress sagged by weight and time. Those nights I came frightened but silent to their bed, a wordless shifting to make room. Worn springs soothingly sighed as feathers nestled around me. At breakfast come morning, no TV or radio or much said, allowing night’s stillness to linger, never asking more of me than a head shake or nod. My grandfather’s words when my parents brought me: This girl will talk when she’s ready.

The ladder-back chair’s legs scrape as I get up. Across the room, bedsprings stir but Gerald does not wake. I leave the house and walk to the barn. Grasshoppers launch, then land, the high stalks swaying. On a loud orange trumpet vine flower, a swallowtail’s blue wings open and close in slow applause. Caught on an angelica tree, a black snake’s cast-off stocking. Closer, ribs of milk traces, manure scabs the color of oatmeal.

The so-much of memory as I step into the dark and wait: always back then believing my grandparents’ barn was asleep until I’d entered, light’s slow emergence like one eyelid drowsily lifted. Even now something of that feeling as I step farther inside. In the corner the duster and pesticides I’ve talked Gerald out of using. Beside them a pitchfork and a kerosene can. A barn swallow flutters in the loft, then the parabolic swoop toward thicker light. On a stall door a leopard slug. Slug: its body a slimy slow lugging, and yet, the twice-pronged crown, the long robe’s silver wake. The slow going forth magisterial, as I’d seen as a child, now see again.

Good memories that even now can heal. Those mornings when I laddered to the loft, made my straw manger beside the square bale door. There on the straw-strewn floor, a sundial of slanted light. I’d reach my child’s palm into it, hold sunspill like rain. Eyes adjusting, much more revealed: junctions knit with spiderwebs, near cross beams dirt dauber nests, the orange tunnels rising like cathedral pipes. Sometimes a shadow suddenly fleshed, long black tail draining into the straw. The few sounds soothing, swallow wings rustling, insect hum. Then my grandmother’s voice. Come, child, it’s time to eat.

I step out into noon’s startling whiteness. Gerald still sleeps so I sit on the porch and take out my notebook, read the entries I wrote last week.

the hummingbird nest at the meadow edge—a strawy thimble

the hummingbird’s wings—stained glass alive in sudden sunlight shimmer

wildflowers sway in their florabundance

the grasshopper’s rasping papyrus wings

I take out my pen, remembering what I felt when Les came and placed his hand firm on my shoulder.

even the hermit thrush calls out to the world