The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read Free Page B

hearth was like playing a big set of pick-up sticks, not wanting to move or bother the whole pile lest the mama coon’d come tearing out hissing and chasing me and the big-headed dog back inside the house. This was something Margaret liked to watch, sometimes taking pictures and sometimes pretending to lock us out with the pissed-off mama coon coming at us on our heels. I stopped getting anything altogether off the pile, settling on burning driftwood, which was a ache and a pain to gather. But the sand in it burned the flames in the fire green and were pretty for us to look at, stretched out naked on the quilt late at night. It came spring soon anyway and we didn’t need the fires, and mama coon and what we called the coonettes started coming up on the steps to look in the house and the way Margaret had with people pretty soon the coonettes were all overthe place eating out of the dog’s bowl and then chasing his tail around the picnic table I still had in the living room for furniture. I only put my foot down the time they all ate the lime rinds we’d had left over from a batch of gin and tonics, and raving and hissing drunk they ripped open my favorite big covered chair and tore out all the stuffing. I think chasing them all out of the house with a broom and a stick hurt Margaret’s feelings, and looking back on it now, I feel sorry for doing it.
    That is the spring I’m come to tell about, the spring of remembering the mama coon and her babies, what I last remember. And this, the night we were hearing one of those quick-boiling thunderstorms step and kick around the place where lightning takes tall walks, us in the bed in the back bedroom with the big-headed dog sitting on the straight-backed chair to watch like he liked to do, us saying the little secret things to each other that people doing what we were doing say, then me feeling the hair on my arm bend the wrong way like in a chill breeze draft, Margaret’s hair floating from her head like a Christmas tree angel’s wings, still doing it but bracing and waiting, and then a stray step of the walking lightning came down through the top of the tree right by my back cabin door. It all happened so fast with the dog scrambling up on the bed and Margaret naked sliding off and the ceiling breaking open for a tree trunk like a telephone pole to come pile-driving all the way through and still on its way down into the floor.And then it being quiet after the explosion, the tree trunk finally stopping, it smoking and smelling that blue electric smell with the burnt-up sap, me and the big-headed dog tangled on the broken bed, with Margaret having hit hard on her back near the hole in the floor stuffed with tree trunk, her long legs kicking in the air with a sexy view, an even more sexy view when I peeked over the mattress at her fully near the trunk of the tree, a sexy view that even further excited me about now being able to use a chain saw indoors.
    But all wasn’t just all right. When Margaret sat up she said Oh, like she had just thought of something she had forgotten, she pressed her fingers below her belly and then the lights flickered off and in the dark she said we needed to go into town for Della, Rusty’s wife Della, Della who is what we have for a midwife and a cat-gut stitcher of slashed skin hereabouts. Della had delivered most nearby babies that could be gotten to, her delivering about two of her own with just Rusty’s help.
    All was not all right because to my eye Margaret wasn’t showing that she’d had something of ours to carry, and the little quick-boil thunderhead seemed to be more of a front coming through with much of it still downriver letting lightning tall walk through trees. Even dressing in the dark, getting ready, not finding a flashlight that worked, I could tell there was lots of blood by the smell and by the way the dog was nervous. Even getting down to the canoe Margaret was feeling weak,making it worse for her that the tide was out and I