Kind One Read Free Page B

Alcofibras’s gardens and play in the yard at weighing them on the market scales or go together to the woods to look for mushrooms or lie as flat as you like on our backs by the creek or hold hands and skip like faeries and flap our arms together like blue jays or hold our faces up to the falling snow like three fingers of the same fork, you will say, and I will nod, that it cannot have been.
    There is a shadow covers it all now.
    There was already shadow deep enough to drown in back then.
    Drown me and those girls. Drown little Alcofibras. Drown those daisies. That meadow. Those tomatoes. That sun.
    Cleome and Zinnia helped me get settled at the home of Linus Lancaster, and they helped me when he commenced to have me into his bedroom.
    They helped me, but I never helped them.

That is not true. That is not the truth’s only portion, not the whole of it. I helped them in those years that came by helping them in other ways. I helped them when they had the fever headache or when they had the ague or when they had the festery eye. I helped them when the tobacco grew so thick they cried to contemplate the day that had to be spent in it, or when there were too many hides to tan, or too much corn to put up, or a biting goat that needed chasing, or a pig that was too mean.
    Zinnia hated icicles, was afraid they would fall on her hat and pierce through her head, so when they got too big and it was her had been set to knocking them off the eaves, and Cleome and the others were at some other work, it was me went around whacking at them with the broom. I like the sound of an icicle hitting snow. The kind of long cave it will make. How it will keep a week without melting when it lies inside that softer cold.
    I helped them with their first girl sicknesses, told them, as my mother had told me, what it was they had to do. They took my hand and thanked me for that. Each one of them in her turn. I think Zinnia’s eye might have sprung a tear. Little bitty thing like a ball of dew. I helped them with that and I helped them sweep and I helped them pluck and I helped them darn and I helped them sew.
    I helped them in those ways and in others, and once one rosy summer day when Linus Lancaster was looking for her with a switch in his hand, I didn’t tell him I’d seen Cleome drop the bucket into the well and dangle herself down its rope.
    “What did you do?” I said, after Linus Lancaster had got tired of yelling and chasing and dropped his switch and gone off to swear and smoke in the woods. Cleome was deep down in the well, her feet almost tickling the water.
    “I spilled coffee on his shoe, then I made him trip when I was cleaning it up,” she said.
    “Sounds like maybe you deserved some switching,” I said. I laughed when I said this and added on for merry measure that I thought a switch or two seemed a small thing to make her creep all the way down a well. She did not laugh though, just looked up at me. There was a cold coming up with her eyeballs out of the dark. Cold made me think of one of those icicle caves. After a while, so you can see how truth has its portions, meager may they be, I steadied the rope and helped her climb back up.

I told it earlier that my teacher in Indiana at the little brick school I used to go to before I joined Linus Lancaster in his paradise had let me lead the lesson. She had let me lead the lesson and had invited my parents in to hear it, and my father came and sat in the back and heard the teacher tell the class that at least she had one pupil that had a head and not a stuffed feed sack to do her thinking with. I had written down a story about a princess who came by luck and cunning and other such foolery to be queen of the clouds, and the teacher had me read that after I had led them all through letters and numbers and the naming of the countries of the world. I had written down that story while the others of them had frolicked to no clear purpose, the teacher said. I had sat on my bench and