MY FATHER BROUGHT WINTER
7
tooth would get'loose he would jerk it out and throw it away without
a word.
I remember one day we did get my father out in the field. It
was a sunny day, clear and cold. A short second growth of sorghum
had come up. It was barely waist high but we couldn't afford to leave
it standing. The three of us went to the field to cut it. My father's
stomach was too fat for him to work fast,
it
got in his way when he
stooped, and he dropped behind. Bran was ahead. I straightened up
and saw him standing still with his hand in his mouth. He stood there
in the thin bright winter sunshine working his hand around in his
mouth. He brought out a tooth, looked at it, and threw it away. He
spat blood, picked up his knife and went on working. My father had
seen, too. He laughed, and shouted to Bran:
"Look at you, throwing yourself away! Better be careful. No
more will grow where that one came from!"
It was true. Bran was throwIng himself away in little pieces over
the field . I remembered Aunt Freda said Bran had been a different
man when he was young, always laughing and joking, and he'd had–
the kind of mouth all the girls wanted to kiss. I stood there in the
clear winter sunshine, holding my shining
knif~.
I looked around me
but nothing was in bloom. A few goldenrods still leaned by the fence
but their color was gone, they were old, old! I wished Bran would
say something to me with his mouth that girls had wanted to kiss, say
it was good to be young no matter what came after.
I still had the room. It wasn't so good in the daytime because I
could see through the windows, and I didn't want to see outside. But
when we lit the lamp after supper and built up the fire it was like
a curtain had been drawn around me. The rest of the world was shut
out and I was safe inside. Pretty soon I would have to go to bed and
the dark would jump like a cat through the window and sit on my
ch~t,
but for an hour or two the dark and all the thoughts that came
crowding with it left me alone. For a while I brought out my books
and tried to study, but they didn't tell me anything I wanted to
hear and I put them away. I'd just sit there soaking in the safety that
seemed a part of the lamplight and the heat from the stove. And I'd
think 'This will go on forever ... the three of us sitting by the stove
with Aunt Freda on the sofa in the corner.' I used to wonder what had
drawn us all together. We weren't a family, we didn't belong together.
I thought there must be a reason even if I couldn't see it. But the
threads were too tangled. Like a grackle'S nest of mixed-up grasses.
It all came down to the fact that we had to eat and we had to live.
And yet there was a reason for those mixed-up grasses being tied to–
gether. They made a whole, and the whole was used for something.
Did we make a whole?
If
we did, I couldn't see it. We weren't being
