World and Town Read Free

view. There was some clearing, but mostly the place was woods, and not the picturesque kind. These were real woods, impassable woods, with trees leaning and lying all over. A lot of sodden logs and lichen and toadstools, and even on the live trees, dead branches that stuck out all around the trunks like thorns. There was no view, and no light. And being sunk in a pocket like that, most of the clearing, aside from the trailer site proper, was wet. What the place really needed was divine intervention in the form of an in-ground dehumidifier. That did not, unfortunately, seem forthcoming. The good Lord did appear to be providing, though, if not for deliverance exactly, then a use for the place—about which, living as close as she did, Hattie was not thrilled. But, well, who could stop Him?
    Hattie having heard that the church was going to do something someday, but having somehow envisioned that someday to be like the Rapture—a day that might or might not be on the immediate horizon. One week, though, the trailer sat as normal in its old site near town. The next its yard looked like a truck trade show. Hattie, out walking the dogs, stopped more or less dead as a churchload of folks jacked up the trailer and split it right down the middle, then with considerable adjusting and cranking and readjusting, opened it up like a child’s pack-’n’-go dollhouse. Things snapped and sank; things leaned and bowed and split. This was not the growth of a crystal or a protein—some natural process bordering on dance. No, this was manmade inelegance itself. Still, only one worker swore (cussed to make the heavens blush , Hattie’s mother would have said), namely baby-faced Everett, husband of Hattie’s walking-group friend, Ginny. Whom someone had up and volunteered, unchurched though he was, on account of his size; never mind that the poor man was bound to incur more ambivalence than gratitude for his pain. Hattie knew him as a guy who would shovel her out in a storm—a man who’d show up without her asking and refuse to be paid, and a regular snow mason to boot, who over the course of the winter would produce path walls so plumb, you could have checked a spirit level against them. He was a kind man, an obliging man. And yet said kind and obliging man would not leave off cussing when people gave him the eye, quite the contrary. Said kind and obliging man seemed, if anything, to cuss all the louder for the looks—a man after Hattie’s own heart in that way, but less dear to his coworkers, she could imagine, as the day wore on. For hear tell a jack gave, a hitch snapped. The coffee ran out. The cold got colder. One man just about took his thumb off, and had to go to Emergency with his hand in a bandanna tourniquet. So who knows but that Everett’s mouth might have proved contagious—who knows but that he might have led others into Error—had the Lord not eventually gotten those trailer halves up on wheels.
    There they were, though, finally, up up—at last—hallelujah! The group disbanded; heathen Everett disappeared. Then down the road the trailer halves rolled, one after the other, their private parts all in public. Did not a body have to wonder how intelligently designed we can be when none of us has so much as a wheel-like option? Well, never mind. The most intriguing part of all this, to Hattie’s mind, had nothing to do with the brute grunting and heaving-ho—or even the dawning realization that the halves were headed toward her house. (Which was not intriguing , by the way—which was a shock!) It was rather when one of the trailer halves passed her on the road. For in the kitchen, as it rumbled by, was a blink of a girl, holding up the cabinets. Young—fourteen or fifteen, Hattie guessed—a tea-skinned pipsqueak of a thing with a swingy black ponytail and a shocking-pink jacket. Some cabinets had gotten knocked loose when the work was being done; the girl was put in there, it seemed, to keep them from coming down