The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
a long way up the ravine. She took the ducks out of her pocket and launched them tenderly into the water. One of them was brown and the other was gray-blue. She had had them for three years now, and she saved them just for April.
The miniature river wound about hummocks sloped as subtly as the mile-round hills rising behind her. The hummocks were beginning to be green, and the washed black mud of the stream bottom was embroidered with sparkling circlets of unfolding leaves. Here and there the water gushed between dark rocks and the ducks leapt and twirled in the rapids. She made bridges of straw for them to swim beneath because she had always wanted to swim under a bridge herself. She rescued them from eddies and spoke to them about the adventure they were having and warned them about the huge and dangerous ocean they were sailing toward. If only she could be as small as the ducks and live in this enormous kingdom of brilliant water and unexplored forests. That would be a hundred times better even than being turned into a boy.
Each winter as the time for thawing drew near, she began to be afraid that the kingdom of the ravine must really have been a dream. Then she would look at the ducks waiting in their proper spot on the kitchen windowsill, so small against the great swirling feathers of frost on the glass behind them. She would know that in the interlude between the glacial winter wasteland and the flaming summer wasteland, those very ducks had swum down an emerald river in a fairy country that was wet and green, like the places she had read about.
When they reached the ocean, she left them in a safe cove and searched for a rock with which to make a great wave. In just a little while there would be no place to splash a rock for another whole year. The entreaties of the blackbirds rang wildly around her. What did they say to each other that excited them so much? It was awful to have to be a human being and never know what all the animals said and never get to live in a cave or a nest or a tunnel or the waving grasses in the slough.
A flight of small gray birds swept over the water, so close they nearly touched their own shadows. They could have been leaves blowing across ice. How glorious to fly like that and see your own luminous image like an arrow flashing beneath you.
Beyond the slough in the burgeoning pasture lay the blue pools of sky. How lovely to be a baby frog trying out first one pool and then another. Sometimes a cloud briefly dipped a white edge in a blue mirror. Sometimes a big cloud would blot out a mirror. Then suddenly Gid and Gad wheeled their black chariot between the earth and the sun, waving their black sleeves and spreading their barren skirts to eclipse the warm light, transforming the blue glass into a cold murky lake and causing the baby frog to kick out desperately with his long webbed feet and hide in the mud.
Sometimes even the whole pasture would go dark, and then the sun would streak through in some far spot and ignite the ground; she would see the spot burn with an unearthly yellow-green fire. Then the clouds would move again and the darkness and the fire would both be gone.
The sun told her that there was time for only one more voyage down the ravine. She must not be late with the cows. Cows could be very stubborn in new grass, especially this time of year when they were not in a hurry to be milked. Most of them were half dry because they would soon be getting new calves.
At last she put the two ducks back in her pocket, wrapped in her handkerchief to get dry and warm. The clouds had multiplied and massed in the sky and the shadows of them raced over her and turned the air frosty around her. She began to notice how icy the soaked wrists of her sweater felt and how wet the knees and seat of her overalls had gotten.
She ran up the hill that bordered the west end of the slough, hoping to find the cows before dusk overtook her. They were there, lined up against the fence and reaching through it, though there was not a whit more grass on the other side. Cows were never happy, once they came to a fence.
“Hie on there!” she yelled. “Cuh boss, cuh boss! Hie on there!” They swung their heads on their flat supple necks and looked at her, but they did not move. She picked up a small stone and shied it off the flank of the nearest one. They started off then, but they stopped to chew at every likely tuft they passed.
She studied the western horizon, feeling so much smaller now that the sun had gone from the pasture. The clouds banked above the hills had turned in a few minutes from white to deep blue. The sun was behind them, lighting their upper edges with a cold pale gold. Her father could always tell when it was going to rain by looking at the clouds. She wanted to be able to tell, too, so that some day he would have to say that she was just as smart as a boy.
He was waiting for her at the barn, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the edges of the open double doors.
“Right on time,” he said approvingly. He seldom sounded that way, and she was encouraged to try again to please him.
“It looks like it might rain tomorrow, doesn’t it?” she said, looking once more toward the west before they followed the cows into the barn.
“Could be,” he agreed, in a half-listening tone. “Could be,” he said again, for the rhythm of it.
She could tell he had forgotten she was there. She went up the hill to the house.
“How on earth did you get so wet?” her mother said. “You just got over one cold, and now you’ll probably get another. Hang your sweater by the stove and change into your other overalls. And you better take off your shoes and put on your slippers. Then hurry and set the table.”
It was impossible for Rachel not to worry over how thin Lucy was when she saw how purple the cold made her. Her little body seemed so breakable, with such long bony legs and such sharply pointed wrists and ankles. But whenever Rachel mentioned getting Lucy’s tonsils out so she could gain weight, George would say, “Oh, pshaw! You ought to have seen me at that age! She’s fat compared to what I was!”
“Why do Gid and Gad always wear such long black dresses?” Lucy asked.
Where did that question come from? Rachel looked out the west window of the kitchen at the gold-and-blue clouds. “Why, maybe because they’re poor now, like all the rest of us. Maybe they don’t have any other clothes.”
She turned from the window to confront the deep inscrutable blue of the clouds in Lucy’s eyes. They looked at her just the same way George’s did when she didn’t manage to say exactly the right thing to him. And sometimes those eyes, only seven years old, could look just as implacable as George’s, and sometimes as shocking and furious.
Lucy took the ducks out of her pocket and arranged them on the windowsill. When she looked up again, the blue of her eyes was the happy artless blue of the clean melted-snow pools in a greening pasture.
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