The Morning and the Evening Read Free Page B

and scratch. He went on with the words carefully inside him. The music began, churned inside him with the words, words about the horse with its mane waving in the wind, and he held everything inside him together as much as he could, till the moment to tell them.
    He found himself at the gate, lifted it and set it back in its rut. Then he went silently, smelling the ragweed, heard frog music, and he heard it and set it apart slowly from his own music. Instinctively he went on through the dark and circled wide around the place where he had seen the snake.
    As he went down into the summer-dried ditch, came up again, the words jarred loose from his chest and he started running, telling them.
    As he heard the first faint bell tinkle, he was running faster, telling about the wind, waving his arms.
    He smelled the pasture for the first time as he came up to her, and he lay down immediately with his head on her soft flank. When he felt her stillness and her warm breath smelling of grass, he began to tell her about the music, and he knew, as much as he could, that through the long summer he would come here again and again.

Chapter Two
    Jake’s mother, standing at the kitchen window, saw him come up out of the potato cellar beneath the house, trip over the top of the ladder, and hit his chin sharply on a rock as he fell to the ground. But before she could move, he had gotten up. In one swift, unusual, sure movement, he collected the spilled potatoes.
    Like one of those cartoon shows, she thought, when things spilled out of a person’s arms jump back into them.
    The blow on the chin had been quite hard, she saw now that he was directly beneath the window. Blood had appeared where the skin had broken open and a faintly blue lump had formed. He seemed either not to mind or to be completely oblivious to what had happened. His expression never changed. It was altogether concentrated on carrying the potatoes for her. He brought them up the back steps and dropped them into a basket. She smelled faintly the odor of dirt that arose from them. Then he went away again, down the back steps.
    Soup simmering on the wood stove rattled the lid of its iron pot. Corn bread was baking in the oven. She stood in the kitchen full of heat and steam and thought of that dark cool cellar in the earth out of which Jake had just come. She would like to go down there and stay a long time, with perhaps a candle to light it by night. The fear of it she had once felt had passed gradually after so many years.
    The wooden door of the cellar was of two parts that opened outward, and flush to the ground. It was thirty years ago she had gone down into the cellar and left one side of the door closed and locked on the outside. She had been in the farthest reaches selecting potatoes when suddenly she was closed completely into the earth.
    Terrified, she had turned, and all she could see was a faint crack of daylight that was the outline of the door.
    â€œJake!” she had called.
    But the same instinct which made her call made her call hollowly, tonelessly, and not loud enough for him to hear; he did not know how to open the door, and he did not know how to close and lock it either.
    Dropping potatoes, she put her hands out blindly to the dark and made her way through it, across the damp earth floor, at each step feeling snakes slithering toward her worn and split-open shoes. She found the ladder and gripped it and went up quickly to the top. She crouched, her face as close as possible to the crack of daylight: security now and life itself. Once, she pushed without hope at the unyielding weight of the door.
    It was early morning. There would be no strangers on the place at this hour. To whoever had closed the door, this was home.
    â€œJud!” she called loudly to her oldest son.
    It seemed she heard heavy breathing on the other side of the door. But she could not be sure and told herself afterward it was only imagination.
    She drifted into semisleep, and