The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Read Free Page B

clap their hands over their ears in horror or that the offender if not turned to stone would certainly be beaten by a noble, clean-limbed hero. But it does not happen that way at all. All that happens is the deepening of the thunder-cloud greyness in my father’s eyes and the heightening of the colour in my mother’s cheeks. And I realize also with a sort of shock that in spite of Scott’s refusal to go on the truck nothing has really changed. I mean not really; and that all of the facts remainawfully and simply the same: that Scott is old and that we are poor and that my father must soon go away and that he must leave us either with Scott or without him. And that it is somehow like my mother’s shielding her children from ‘swearing’ for so many years, only to find one day that it too is there in its awful reality in spite of everything that she had wished and wanted. And even as I am thinking this my father goes by MacRae who is still standing in the ever-widening puddles of brown, seeming like some huge growth that is nourished by the foul-smelling waters that he himself has brought.
    David who had released my father’s legs with the entrance of MacRae makes a sort of flying tackle for them now but I intercept him and find myself saying as if from a great distance my mother’s phrases in something that sounds almost like her voice, “Let’s go and finish feeding the chickens.” I tighten my grip on his arm and we almost have to squeeze past MacRae whose bulk is blocking the doorway and who has not yet made a motion to leave.
    Out of doors my father is striding directly into the slashing rain to where Scott is standing in something like puzzlement with his back to the rain and his halter-shank dangling before him. When he sees my father approach he cocks his ears and nickers in recognition. My father who looks surprisingly slight with his wet clothes plastered to his body takes the rope in his hand and moves off with the huge horse following him eagerly. Their movement seems almost that of the small tug docking the huge ocean freighter, except that they are so individually and collectively alive. As they approach the truck’s ramp, it is my father who hesitates and seems to flinch, and it is his foot which seems to recoil as it touches the planking; but on the part of Scott there is no hesitation at all; his hooves echo firmly and confidently on the strong wet wood and his head is almost pressed into the small of my father’s back; he is so eager to get to wherever they are going.
    He follows him as I have remembered them all of my life and imagined them even before. Following wildlythrough the darkened caverns of the mine in its dryness as his shoes flashed sparks from the tracks and the stone; and it its wetness with both of them up to their knees in water, feeling rather than seeing the landing of their splashing feet and with the coal cars thundering behind them with such momentum that were the horse to stumble the very cars he had set in motion would roll over him, leaving him mangled and grisly to be hauled above ground only as carrion for the wheeling gulls. And on the surface, following, in the summer’s heat with the jolting haywagon and the sweat churned to froth between his legs and beneath his collar, fluttering white on the blackness of his glistening coat. And in the winter, following, over the semi-frozen swamps as the snapping, whistling logs snaked behind him, grunting as he broke through the shimmering crystal ice which slashed his fetlocks and caused a scarlet trail of bloodied perforations on the whiteness of the snow. And in the winter, too, with the ton of coal upon the sleigh, following, even over the snowless stretches, driven bare by the wind, leaning low with his underside parallel and almost touching the ground, grunting, and swinging with violent jolts to the right and then to the left, moving the sleigh forward only by moving it sideways, which he had learned was the only way it