Everything in This Country Must Read Free

truck was near out of sight, red lights on the hedgerows.
    I heard the living room door shut, then the kitchen door, then the pantry door where Father keeps his hunting rifle, then the front door, and I heard the sound of the clicker on the rifle and him still crying going farther and farther away until the crying was gone and he must have been in the courtyard standing in the rain.
    The clock on the mantelpiece sounded very loud, so did the rain, so did my breathing, and I looked out the window.
    It was all near empty on the outside road and the soldiers were going around the corner away when I heard the sounds; it wasn’t like bullets, it was more like pops one two three.
    The clock still ticked.
    It ticked and ticked and ticked.
    The curtain was wet around me but I pulled it tight. I was scared, I couldn’t move. I waited it seemed like forever.
    When Father came in from outside I knew what it was. His face was like it was cut from a stone and he was not crying anymore and he didn’t even look at me, just went to sit in the chair. He picked up his teacup and it rattled on the saucer so he put it down again and he put his face in his hands and he stayed like that. The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favorite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie’s jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.

WOOD
    I T WAS JUST PAST NIGHTTIME when we brought the logs down to the mill. The storm was finished but there was snow still on the hedges and it looked like they had a white eyebrow.
    Mammy drove the red tractor. It went down the lane with hardly any speed at all. The headlights were off and she kept the throttle steady so as nobody would hear. She was wrapped in two coats and I had my brown duffle closed to the neck but still the wind was cold. The logs scraped along the ground behind the tractor and made a sound like they were nervous too. The logs were wrapped with chains to keep them from slipping, but still the chains rattled and I held my breath.
    The light from Daddy’s room was on. It sprayed out yellow onto the snow at the back of the house.
    Mammy said hush to me.
    She pushed the throttle forward and the tractor quickened a little on the hill. She didn’t want the engine to cut out and die. Daddy might hear something and then he would ask. The engine was like the sound of a cough rising.
    Mammy turned in the tractor seat and pulled up her head scarf to look back and see if all the logs were following. I was walking behind the logs and I gave her a wave and she smiled and turned again.
    My boots made footprints in the tracks left by the pulled wood. They were size eights that belonged once to Daddy and still they were much too big for me and I could feel the newspaper shifting in the toes.
    The snow had frozen and it crunched under my feet.
    The tractor got to the top of the hill and then, when the logs came up, Mammy pulled back on the throttle.
    All the clouds had disappeared and there was a slice of moon out that looked like a coin had been tossed in the sky. I wanted to sit on the end of the logs and have the tractor skid me along. We had a small wooden cart before Daddy got sick and he skidded us through the fields on the back of a rope. We laughed and shouted hard, me and my brothers. Sometimes he dragged us along through the mud, all the way down to the church where we had services. Once he pulled the cart too hard and we slammed into a tree. I got a big cut on my head and it bled down my chin, but I didn’t go to the hospital. Daddy said I was a big enough lad, not to cry, and he carried me all the way home. He had wide shoulders then, not hunched into himself like an old raven.
    *   *   *
    THE MAN WITH THE BIG CAR had called at the door three days