Jolly Read Free Page B

her kindly older sisters called her “calling,” watching silently as those sisters, and the younger one, and the boys each married and began to take hold in hilly Tennessee country.
    For a year, between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-two, she watched the comings and goings of the blue-eyes-wild Jimmy Osment, who seemed to have swooped down from the north one day, from Indiana, some said. She watched the sawmill take shape from old ruins along Sandcastle Creek as she walked to and from the school. Mattawilde could not have said when the day came when she first paused in the obscurity of hickory shade to watch the brown, muscled back that seemed by nature to be turned. She could not have said whether she was shocked or intrigued by the tales that sprang up about his night work, which ranged, if the stories could be believed, not only throughout the whole length and width of their valley, but clear over the mountains into the next county, and farther. She did know personally one girl—only a slip of a girl, really, not more than seventeen or eighteen—who had taken that brown-edged white grin for more than it meant, and who had since moved away to live with an aunt for some months. Mattawilde could not have even said for sure the exact day when, after the mill was finished and operating, she had stopped beneath the limbs while a cold fall rain drizzled, and Jimmy Osment stepped into her path from the other side of a tree, grinning and cracking two hickory nuts together in his hand, sending the muscles of his arm pacing up to where the sleeve of his blue denim shirt was ripped off at the shoulder.
    The first boy—Jamie—was like that. From the beginning he was lusty and belligerent and independent and blue-eyes-wild. With him Mattawilde knew what to expect—the unexpected—because Jamie was really Jimmy again. He seemed to have grown up before he was a child, and while they lived in the country (but now far to the west), before Jimmy died of a stupid, city-bred disease, Jamie at fifteen had already begun to range from their valley into the other valleys and then into town, sometimes not reappearing for three or four days, then to grin, and she couldn’t be angry, and he would stay around home fighting with Jimmy, or leading his younger brother patiently over wide arcs in the hills and back home again for the days it took for his horse to rest and her to mend the rips and tears in his shirts.
    Jamie never talked much. He didn’t have to. She knew what was on his mind even when he said nothing. When his father died, Jamie showed the only sign of emotion he had ever shown to anyone, and that surprised her. He went on another year to finish high school in town, more, most believed, out of malice than from any desire to own a diploma. He came back once after that to the country place, and although he didn’t say it, she knew as she mended his shirts that he was going—for good, probably. He did not say goodbye to her, but he did stop halfway down the lane, right before it bent out of sight, to pet Pekoe and lay his hand for a moment on the head of Jolly, who stood from his sticks-and-rocks ant corral to watch him turn the corner.

 
TWO
     
    JAMIE OSMENT and Mandis Patterson were both awakened by the sun’s first slant across their eyes. Both half turned where they slept and reached out a hand toward someone they expected to find. Neither found anyone. He blinked toward the sun, then hunkered himself and the wadded blanket over two feet until his head was again in the shadow of the shagged tamarisk. He turned his face into his arms and fought against the sun already mirroring across the river.
    She bent the outstretched arm under herself and raised to peer into the crib. Her gaze, and then her smile, was met by the solemn blue eyes of the boy who had been watching her silently and wet for some minutes, his face tightly squeezed against two bars of the crib that hid enough of the sides of his face to make it look thin