Zeely Read Free Page A

the pump room on well water cold as ice.
    The rest of the house was large and spread out. Geeder supposed all farmhouses were like that. Her favorite place was the parlor; it was silent, with blinds and curtains drawn to keep out the heat.
    Standing in the room, she didn’t know she had begun to talk to herself. “Look at all those old pictures,” she said. Photographs, yellow with age, lined the walls and the tops of tables. “I’ll bet that one is Uncle Ross when he was a boy. And that one is him for sure as a young man. I don’t even have a memory of those other people. Probably Uncle Ross doesn’t either, the pictures are so old.”

    There was a large photograph of a woman she knew to be Uncle Ross’ wife, Aunt Leah. She was no longer living.
    “She’s awfully pretty,” Geeder whispered. “I wish I could have known her.”
    The parlor had comfortable chairs, a sofa with many soft pillows and tables with drawers full of candy. Some of the candy tasted as though it had lain in the drawers for years, but Geeder ate it anyway. There was an upright piano against the far wall, away from the windows.
    “I think I’ll just play it once,” Geeder said. She sat down on the piano bench and touched the keys gently. The sound came forth muted, as if it had waited a long time. The soft tone thrilled her.
    “I can play a few songs a little bit.” She spoke more to the piano than to herself. “I wish I could play well. I wish I knew a lot of pretty songs that would just fill up this room!”
    A breeze pulled the blinds in and out against the window screens. The lace curtains were sucked up and down along the blinds, making a queer sound all of a sudden. Geeder felt a chill creep up her neck. The photographs seemed to look through her, as though she were a stranger.
    She got up and, not looking back, flounced out of the room. “There’s nothing you can do with an old piano,” she said.
    She wandered into the hall, where there was a cherry-wood staircase. She had noticed it when she first came into the house. Uncle Ross had said it was new, that the old one had fallen down in a heap a long time ago. It led, curving gently around, to the bedrooms above. The stairs had been in the back of her mind ever since she sat down at the piano. And the banister was the kind of thing she could touch and know.
    “Better than old, yellowed photographs anytime,” she said. She tried sniffing the banister. “It smells just like the tallest tree in the woods!”
    Upstairs, she and Toeboy had separate bedrooms on opposite sides of a long corridor. Her room had a large, soft bed, a bureau with a mirror that she could turn any way she wished and two antique cherry-wood chairs with silk cushions. She opened her suitcase and put all her clothes away in the closet and bureau. At the bottom of the suitcase was a box full of the rest of her necklaces. These she hung from the bedposts and the backs of the chairs. When she lay on the bed, the necklaces made her feel that she rested among stars.
    Across the room from the bed were windows that looked out on the rear yard, a big, empty barn and a smaller shed.
    Since he no longer farmed, Uncle Ross kept no livestock about. There was just a fenced-in yard at the side of the house for the chickens.
    Soon, Geeder got up from the bed and left her room. Slowly, she went over the whole house. Uncle Ross was somewhere outside, and she supposed Toeboy was with him. She had no one to bother her and could take her time. She went to Toeboy’s room. His bed was large like hers and his windows looked out over the front yard and the high hedge that shielded the house from the road. She put all Toeboy’s clothes away and stacked his books neatly on the floor by the bed.
    “We’ll have to get a bookcase for all these books,” she said, “or he’ll have them scattered from one end of the house to the other.”
    She went to Uncle Ross’ room. “I don’t suppose he’d mind if I just look in,” she said.