Laughter in the Wind Read Free

afterward. “Be back by five,” she said, shaking her head as she watched Rebecca gather worms from her worm bed then pick up a smelly bag of chicken livers and toss it in a bucket to take along.
    “Yes Mom,” Rebecca groaned. Actually she had no other plans for the day and would probably be home well before then, but she felt like she should protest a little just to remind her mother she wasn’t a kid anymore. She would be nineteen in four months and she had been a college student for the past three months. She headed out across the yard to the pasture fence, her mind already moving ahead to the upcoming battle between her and the fish, or at least to a few hours lazing on the pond bank letting the fish steal her bait.
    It was a cool morning, only thirty-eight degrees, but it was supposed to hit sixty degrees by two o’clock. Fishing today probably wouldn’t be good but Rebecca didn’t care. It wasn’t really about catching fish. Something about sitting on the bank of a pond or river, watching the water move and listening to it lap gently onto the bank, was as pleasurable to her as the ballet she had attended the previous year with the High School Honor Society. She didn’t want to miss out on what might be the last nice weekend of the year for being outside. This time of year in Missouri, the weather could change on you suddenly and there could be snow on the ground the following weekend. Just as likely, a sudden warm spell could pass through with record high temperatures. Rebecca was familiar with the uncertainties of a Missouri autumn and wasn’t taking chances.
    In the back of her mind, she admitted that fishing would give her an opportunity to think and maybe she would finally be able to sort out some of the chaos that was going on in her head. Sometimes she felt like she was spinning her wheels, yet she knew she was taking steps that should keep her life moving forward. She was more than halfway through her first semester of classes at the community college in Rockford where she attended morning classes and worked a work-study job in the afternoon. Deciding on a major was a task she had deemed currently impossible, so she was taking the basics toward an Associate of Arts degree until she could figure out what she really wanted to do with her life. Her tentative plan was to move to a larger university after a couple of years. The thought of this frightened her some, especially when she tried to imagine life away from the farm.
    Rebecca crossed the fence into the second pasture, picked up her things from where she had pushed them under the fence and continued her hike. While she doubted she could be happy staying in this small area all of her life, she also dreaded the thought of leaving a place where she knew everyone and was known by everyone. She had grown up as the middle grandchild in a generational group of forty-five, most of them living within a twenty-mile radius. For several generations, her father’s family had lived in the area, so distant cousins lived in all of the surrounding communities. The feeling that someone was watching out for her was ever-present and no one was a stranger. Sometimes life here felt stifling but usually it just felt good to know you always belonged. This secure feeling was something she knew she would have to leave behind.
    As she crossed the second pasture she glanced over at the old Peacock Cemetery in the northwest corner of the pasture. There hadn’t been a burial there for years and some of her school friends claimed it was haunted, not too much of a worry on a bright sunny morning. Something seemed different about the cemetery today though, and she stopped to really look for a few seconds. The gate had been hanging crooked for years but it had been closed and latched two weeks ago when she had last cut through the pasture on foot. Maybe someone was up here fooling around on Halloween.
    She and her father had talked about fixing up the old cemetery someday, maybe