Gabriel's Story

Gabriel's Story Read Free Page B

Book: Gabriel's Story Read Free
Author: David Anthony Durham
Tags: Fiction
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action and the expense of such an endeavor. He indicated the size of the land they owned with gestures that seemed to encompass the earth itself. He pointed out boundaries that no eye but his own could see, and he expounded on their good fortune, by the grace of God, at being able to acquire such a large and promising parcel.
    Despite his eloquence, the three newcomers, even Eliza, shared a look of forlorn suspicion as they took in what lay before them. The soddy stood, in the light of day, like an earthen ogre, with the door as its gaping mouth and the dingy window as its one remaining eye. The roof hung low and tired, a bushy mass of hair no different from the fields of grass around them, except dead where the fields were living. Solomon spoke as if the barn existed already, as if there were stables full of thoroughbreds and rows of planted corn, but the three saw none of this. The barn lived only in the man’s mind, the stables even more so, and the areas of turned earth were feeble and lifeless in comparison with the untouched expanses around them.
    Behind the house and set some thirty yards away was a fenced-in area of mud and filth, at the center of which stood a mid-sized sow. She watched the family approach with a curious gaze, although she didn’t let it stop her from her business, which appeared to be nosing around in the mud with her snout. Solomon called her a guarantee against the weather or locusts, a sure profit and a fail-safe so that no one calamity could destroy them. The pig stared back through all of this with a skeptical look that said she was not as impressed with them as they were with her. She grunted, raised her snout in the air, then turned her back to them and moved off toward the far end of the pen.
    â€œI wish I could be showing you the whole place up and running,” Solomon said, “but last year was tough, harder than I thought. For everyone, but harder even for the coloreds.”
    â€œHere and elsewhere,” Eliza said. “That’s how it always is.”
    â€œTrue. True. That’s how it always is.” Solomon nodded at the sad reality of this. “They gave me some trouble about the land, it being such a good piece, but we own it free and clear all the same. Out here, a man ain’t so much fighting against white folks as he is fighting against the land. White folks still cause you trouble, but the land . . . Apart from everything else, there were the locusts, a plague of them. Figured you read about it in the papers.” Eliza nodded that she had. “They tore through this country, ate everything in sight. Some things I wouldn’t have thought you could eat, too. Air was so thick with them you feared to breathe them in. It was a hell of a thing.” He looked down at his feet and scuffed the soil with his toe. “But they won’t come back this year.”
    â€œHow do you know?” Ben asked.
    â€œI don’t
know
, but that’s what I expect. Folks say they never do come back two years consecutive, least not that many. I don’t mean to tell the Lord his business, but I figure it’s about time for him to smile on us.”
    Gabriel stood silently for a few moments, apparently meditating on providence and God’s role in bestowing it. But when he spoke, his mind showed a different focus. “Thought you said we already had a barn.”
    â€œWell . . .” Solomon shrugged like a man caught at some childish prank, embarrassed but smiling. “You would’ve already had a barn if you’d come out in midsummer. Y’all gotta remember you come out earlier than I expected. It’s still in the planning stages right now.”
    Gabriel acknowledged no humor in the situation. “You didn’t write about no planning stage. You wrote a whole lot of things I don’t see no sign of.”
    The man’s lips pursed before he spoke, but his voice was calm. “Well, I’m not that good a letter

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