Margaret from Maine (9781101602690) Read Free

stand behind the president when he signed into law a bill sponsoring increased funding for veterans in a vegetative state, seemed too political and too far from life on the Maine farm. At least that’s what he said. Margaret suspected that Benjamin found the social demands—the chitchat, the stuffy meals, even the mandatory coat and tie—difficult to endure. He preferred the cows’ company, and in that she did not blame him. She liked the cows better than she liked most people.
    â€œYou’re better at that sort of thing,” he said finally.
    â€œI’m not much good at it, but it seems to be for a good cause.”
    â€œâ€™Course it is.”
    â€œI’m tempted to bring Gordon, but he’s a little young. I’d like him to see Washington, but maybe he’s not ready yet.”
    â€œHe’ll be fine here with me.”
    â€œI’ll give Mr. King a call back then and say I’ll do it. It’s a little something we can do for Thomas.”
    Benjamin nodded and smiled. For an instant, she spotted the family resemblance. It had passed from Benjamin to Thomas and now to Gordon. They were all big men—at least Gordon seemed headed in that direction—with plain, solid features and strong chins. Margaret often thought of them as trees, as a circle of oaks growing out from a central grand oak, their lives established by acorns carried deeper into the forest by slow, gradual progress. She found nothing hurried about any of her men.
    It was a short morning. By the time she finished her chores, the sunlight had already become a bright bar in the barn doorway. As she returned to the house, she passed by the phoebe nest. Her boots made a loud clumping sound against the ground. Dew flicked up from her toes. A nice breeze moved across the north pasture and it stopped her for a moment. She put her hand to her eyes, shading the morning sun from her vision while she looked slowly around the farm. Spring, she thought. Late May. She took a deep breath, then another, and she watched for a moment as the breeze pushed the large web of a barn spider into a shimmering dance. She thought of
Charlotte’s Web
, the story by E. B. White that always came to mind whenever she saw a spider’s web.
What a pig,
she thought, then she continued across the dooryard, climbed the back porch, and pulled one foot, then the other, out of the muck boots. The boots released her feet slowly, gasping as they did, and she closed the screen door behind her, the weight of her step setting the china in the dining room cabinet to rattling and gossiping.
    * * *
    The boy—Gordon, six years old—had been waking for a half hour, sleep coming and going over him like a drawer hesitantly opened and closed. He lay in his single bed, his body making a bulge only halfway down the tube formed by the blue Hudson Bay blanket his mother had tucked around him the night before. A red plaid curtain lifted and fell, lifted and fell with the breeze that pushed across the farm. It was the same breeze his mother had felt when she stepped out of the barn, but the boy couldn’t know that and neither could she.
    Around the boy, in the mountainous contours of his blankets, several dozen green army men enjoyed a quiet peace in their endless war. The men—cheap plastic army men, perfectly green, stamped out in a factory near Shanghai, China—replicated poses more closely associated with World War II than Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam. Near the boy’s chest, fallen into a bunker near his armpit, a radioman, kneeling, held a World War II walkie-talkie to his ear and chin, listening for messages that never came, detailing their positions, which changed nightly depending on the boy’s whims. On the other side of his arm, set up in an ambush, seven riflemen lay on their bellies and pointed their plastic rifles at the foot of the bed. One of the rifles had broken away, and the boy, hearing accounts