• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3015 0

of hay; she tasted the sweet summer dryness in her mouth. In the distances of her mind the wagon still rocked, rocking its young girls' burden, the teasing anxiety, the singing, the moon and stars and the moving roof of leaves, Moon Lake brimming and the boat on it, the smiling drowse of boys, and the way she herself had let nobody touch even her hand. And she thought back to the sailor beginning to run down the street, as strange a sight with his clothes partly missing as a mer-man from the lake, and around again to Miss Eckhart and Virgie coming together on the deadquiet sidewalk. What she was certain of was the distance those two had gone, as if all along they had been making a trip (which the sailor was only starting). It had changed them. They were deliberately terrible. They looked at each other and neither wished to speak. They did not even horrify each other. No one could touch them now, either.

Danke schoen . . . That much was out in the open. Gratitude—like rescue—was simply no more. It was not only past; it was outworn and cast away. Both Miss Eckhart and Virgie Rainey were human beings terribly at large, roaming on the face of the earth. And there were others of them—human beings, roaming, like lost beasts.

Into her head flowed the whole of the poem she had found in that book. It ran perfectly through her head, vanishing as it went, one line yielding to the next, like a torch race. All of it passed through her head, through her body. She slept, but sat up in bed once and said aloud, " 'Because a fire was in my head.'" Then she fell back unresisting. She did not see except in dreams that a face looked in; that it was the grave, unappeased, and radiant face, once more and always, the face that was in the poem.

SIR RABBIT

He looked around first one side of the tree and then the other. And not a word!

"Oh-oh. I know you, Mr. King MacLain!" Mattie Will cried, but the impudence—which still seemed marvelous to her since she'd never laid eyes on him close or thought of opening her mouth to him—all the impudence was carried off on the batting spring wind. "I know the way you do." When it came down to it, scared or not, she wanted to show him she'd heard all about King MacLain and his way. And scared or not, the air made her lightheaded.

If it was Mr. King, he was, suddenly, looking around both sides of the tree at once—two eyes here and two eyes there, two little Adam's apples, and all those little brown hands. She shut her eyes, then her mouth. She planted her hoe in front of her toes and stood her ground by the bait can, too old—fifteen—to call out now that something was happening, but she took back what she'd said.

Then as she peeped, it was two MacLains that came out from behind the hickory nut tree. Mr. MacLain's twins, his sons of course. Who would have believed they'd grown up?—or almost; for they were scared. They must be as old as herself, thought Mattie Will. People aren't prepared for twins having to grow up like ordinary people but see them always miniature and young somewhere. And here they were coming—the very spit of Mr. King their father.

Mattie Will waited on them. She yawned—strangely, for she felt at that moment as though somewhere a little boat was going out on a lake, never to come back—to see two little meanies coming now that she'd never dreamed of, instead of the one that would have terrified her for the rest of her days.

Those twins were town boys. They had their own pop stand by the post office stile on Saturdays in summer. Out here in the country they had undone their knee buckles and came jingling. Their fair bangs lifted and fell in the soft downy light under the dark tree, with its flowers so few you could still count them, it was so early in spring. They trotted down and up through the little gully like a pony pair that could keep time to music in the Ringling Brothers', touching shoulders until the last.

They made a tinkling circle around her. They didn't give her a chance to begin her own commotion, only lifted away her hoe that she stretched out and leaned it on the big