World and Town Read Free Page A

completely. Never mind that her spindly legs were wholly inadequate for the job—there she was all the same, gamely holding them up. Having taught high school for the better part of her life, Hattie waved at the poor thing; this being one of the things teaching’s made of her, besides a habitual hoarder of chalk: a compulsive supporter of gumption. True, she’d retired right after Joe and Lee died. (As she had had to, being unable to bear the campus at which they’d all taught—being unable to climb the hill with the crocuses, or to set foot in the teachers’ lounge, anything.) But never mind. That the girl did not wave back is the thing—that she could not begin to think about waving back, probably. Still, Hattie waved anyway—as the girl might never have even noticed, had the trailer not happened to hit a pothole.
    A well-known pothole, this was, more famous in these parts than any movie star. It was top of the summer list for the road repair crew—a gap big enough to make you fear for your car axle. If locals had drawn up the map, this thing would have been on it in red. But that driver hailing from parts unknown, he failed to slow down—making for a jolt. The top of the trailer tilted like a fair ride; the girl was slammed askew. She lost her footing; a door sprang open; some cabinets tore off and a drawer shot out, sailing with surprising aplomb out onto the road, where it landed, spinning.
    “Help!” the girl shouted.
    “I’ve got it!” Hattie called back.
    Did the girl hear? In any case, as the trailer pulled back level, the dogs and Hattie went and rescued the drawer—a wood-veneer affair, with a pitted, copper-tone, Mediterranean-look pull. Empty. The sort of thing you don’t even see as a thing unless it’s lying in the road and about to get run over. The dogs sniffed it immediately, of course. Wise Cato dropping his tail even as Annie the puppy attacked it; Reveille the glutton nosed an inside corner. For the thing did smell of cinnamon—someone’s ex–spice drawer, guessed Hattie, as she picked it up. A thing worth something on its own, but a thing you’d have to say had suffered a loss, too. Its fellow drawers, after all—not to say all the cabinetry it had ever known.
    Ah, but what has happened to her that she can find herself feeling sorry for a kitchen drawer?
    Hattie gone batty!
    Anyway, there the thing was, still in one piece.
    S he would have brought it back the very next day, except for the rain attack—these huge drops leaving the sky with murderous intent. Anyone foolish enough to pit an umbrella against them would only meet defeat even before the onslaught turned, like this one, into something resembling concrete aggregate. Of course, it will let up soon enough. Soon enough, Hattie’s friend Greta will be whizzing by again, her white braid flying and her back baskets full—honking Hi! at Hattie’s house, midwestern-style, as if to remind her of the music series, the dam project, the water quality patrol! So many ways to Get Involved, so many ways to Prove an Exemplary Citizen!
    For a blessed few days, though, Hattie the Less Exemplary sits painting bamboo. One stalk, two.
    Wind. Sleet. Hail.
    She dips her máobĭ in the ink.
    Rain.
    Until finally comes a big blue sky, solid as wallboard.
    Hattie admires the mountains as she crosses her side yard—the mountains in Riverlake being neither the highest hills around, nor the most dramatic, but quite possibly the most beguiling. Folding into one another like dunes, if you can imagine dunes dark with trees and sprinkled with farms. The west side of the lake, where Hattie lives, tends to the plunging and irregular—irrepressible granite heaves with drifts of unidentified other matter in between. (Including, this time of year, a few last gray amoebae of snow.) The east side, though—which she can see from her side yard and back porch—is rolling and dotted with some of the big old farms that used to be everywhere around here.