Re: Super Deep Throat Mod Loader 7 Mod Loader 8.epub
Macabeo Eastman
A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabinchimney. The smoke was blue where it left the red of the clay. Ittrailed into the blue of the April sky and was no longer blue butgray. The boy Jody watched it, speculating. The fire on thekitchen hearth was dying down. His mother was hanging up pots andpans after the noon dinner. The day was Friday. She would sweepthe floor with a broom of ti-ti and after that, if he were lucky,she would scrub it with the corn shucks scrub. If she scrubbedthe floor she would not miss him until he had reached the Glen.He stood a minute, balancing the hoe on his shoulder.
The clearing itself was pleasant if the unweeded rows of youngshafts of corn were not before him. The wild bees had found thechinaberry tree by the front gate. They burrowed into the fragileclusters of lavender bloom as greedily as though there were noother flowers in the scrub; as though they had forgotten theyellow jessamine of March; the sweet bay and the magnolias aheadof them in May. It occurred to him that he might follow the swiftline of flight of the black and gold bodies, and so find abee-tree, full of amber honey. The winter's cane syrup was goneand most of the jellies. Finding a bee-tree was nobler work thanhoeing, and the corn could wait another day. The afternoon wasalive with a soft stirring. It bored into him as the bees boredinto the chinaberry blossoms, so that he must be gone across theclearing, through the pines and down the road to the runningbranch. The bee-tree might be near the water.
He stood his hoe against the split-rail fence. He walked downthe cornfield until he was out of sight of the cabin. He swunghimself over the fence on his two hands. Old Julia the hound hadfollowed his father in the wagon to Grahamsville, but Rip thebull-dog and Perk the new feice saw the form clear the fence andran toward him. Rip barked deeply but the voice of the smallmongrel was high and shrill. They wagged deprecatory short tailswhen they recognized him. He sent them back to the yard. Theywatched after him indifferently. They were a sorry pair, hethought, good for nothing but the chase, the catch and the kill.They had no interest in him except when he brought them theirplates of table scraps night and morning. Old Julia was a gentlething with humans, but her worn-toothed devotion was only for hisfather, Penny Baxter. Jody had tried to make up to Julia, but shewould have none of him.
"You was pups together," his father told him, "ten year gone,when you was two year old and her a baby. You hurted the leetlething, not meanin' no harm. She cain't bring herself to trustyou. Hounds is often that-a-way."
He made a circle around the sheds and corn-crib and cut souththrough the black-jack. He wished he had a dog like GrandmaHutto's. It was white and curly-haired and did tricks. WhenGrandma Hutto laughed and shook and could not stop, the dogjumped into her lap and licked her face, wagging its plumed tailas though it laughed with her. He would like anything that washis own, that licked his face and followed him as old Juliafollowed his father. He cut into the sand road and began to runeast. It was two miles to the Glen, but it seemed to Jody that hecould run forever. There was no ache in his legs, as when he hoedthe corn. He slowed down to make the road last longer. He hadpassed the big pines and left them behind. Where he walked now,the scrub had closed in, walling in the road with dense sandpines, each one so thin it seemed to the boy it might makekindling by itself. The road went up an incline. At the top hestopped. The April sky was framed by the tawny sand and thepines. It was as blue as his homespun shirt, dyed with GrandmaHutto's indigo. Small clouds were stationary, like bolls ofcotton. As he watched, the sunlight left the sky a moment and theclouds were gray.
The down grade tempted him to a lope. He reached thethick-bedded sand of the Silver Glen road. The tar-flower was inbloom, and fetter-bush and sparkleberry. He slowed to a walk, sothat he might pass the changing vegetation tree by tree, bush bybush, each one unique and familiar. He reached the magnolia treewhere he had carved the wildcat's face. The growth was a signthat there was water nearby. It seemed a strange thing to him,when earth was earth and rain was rain, that scrawny pines shouldgrow in the scrub, while by every branch and lake and river theregrew magnolias. Dogs were the same everywhere, and oxen and mulesand horses. But trees were different in different places.
The east bank of the road shelved suddenly. It dropped belowhim twenty feet to a spring. The bank was dense with magnolia andloblolly bay, sweet gum and gray-barked ash. He went down to thespring in the cool darkness of their shadows. A sharp pleasurecame over him. This was a secret and a lovely place.
A spring as clear as well water bubbled up from nowhere in thesand. It was as though the banks cupped green leafy hands to holdit. There was a whirlpool where the water rose from the earth.Grains of sand boiled in it. Beyond the bank, the parent springbubbled up at a higher level, cut itself a channel through whitelimestone and began to run rapidly down-hill to make a creek. Thecreek joined Lake George, Lake George was a part of the St.John's River, the great river flowed northward and into the sea.It excited Jody to watch the beginning of the ocean. There wereother beginnings, true, but this one was his own. He liked tothink that no one came here but himself and the wild animals andthe thirsty birds.
He was warm from his jaunt. The dusky glen laid cool hands onhim. He rolled up the hems of his blue denim breeches and steppedwith bare dirty feet into the shallow spring. His toes sank intothe sand. It oozed softly between them and over his bony ankles.The water was so cold that for a moment it burned his skin. Thenit made a rippling sound, flowing past his pipe-stem legs, andwas entirely delicious. He walked up and down, digging his bigtoe experimentally under smooth rocks he encountered. A school ofminnows flashed ahead of him down the growing branch. He chasedthem through the shallows. They were suddenly out of sight asthough they had never existed. He crouched under a bared andoverhanging live-oak root where a pool was deep, thinking theymight reappear, but only a spring frog wriggled from under themud, stared at him, and dove under the tree root in a spasmodicterror. He laughed.
A breeze parted the canopied limbs over him. The sun droppedthrough and lay on his head and shoulders. It was good to be warmat his head while his hard calloused feet were cold. The breezedied away; the sun no longer reached him. He waded across to theopposite bank where the growth was more open. A low palmettobrushed him. It reminded him that his knife was snug in hispocket; that he had planned as long ago as Christmas, to makehimself a flutter-mill.
He had never built one alone. Grandma Hutto's son Oliver hadalways made one for him whenever he was home from sea. He went towork intently, frowning as he tried to recall the exact anglenecessary to make the mill-wheel turn smoothly. He cut two forkedtwigs and trimmed them into two Y's of the same size. Oliver hadbeen very particular to have the cross-bar round and smooth, heremembered. A wild cherry grew half-way up the bank. He climbedit and cut a twig as even as a polished pencil. He selected apalm frond and cut two strips of the tough fiber, an inch wideand four inches long. He cut a slit lengthwise in the center ofeach of them, wide enough to insert the cherry twig. The stripsof palm frond must be at angles, like the arms of a windmill. Headjusted them carefully. He separated the Y-shaped twigs bynearly the length of the cherry cross-bar and pushed them deepinto the sand of the branch bed a few yards below the spring.
The water was only a few inches deep but it ran strongly, witha firm current. The palm-frond mill-wheel must just brush thewater's surface. He experimented with depth until he wassatisfied, then laid the cherry bar between the twigs. It hungmotionless. He twisted it a moment, anxiously, helping it to fititself into its forked grooves. The bar began to rotate. Thecurrent caught the flexible tip of one bit of palm frond. By thetime it lifted clear, the rotation of the bar brought the angledtip of the second into contact with the stream. The small leafypaddles swung over and over, up and down. The little wheel wasturning. The flutter-mill was at work. It turned with the easyrhythm of the great water-mill at Lynne that ground corn intomeal.
He moved a stone that was matching its corners against hissharp ribs and burrowed a little, hollowing himself a nest forhis hips and shoulders. He stretched out one arm and laid hishead on it. A shaft of sunlight, warm and thin like a lightpatchwork quilt, lay across his body. He watched the flutter-millindolently, sunk in the sand and the sunlight. The movement washypnotic. His eyelids fluttered with the palm-leaf paddles. Dropsof silver slipping from the wheel blurred together like the tailof a shooting star. The water made a sound like kittens lapping.A rain frog sang a moment and then was still. There was aninstant when the boy hung at the edge of a high bank made of thesoft fluff of broom-sage, and the rain frog and the starrydripping of the flutter-mill hung with him. Instead of fallingover the edge, he sank into the softness. The blue, white-tuftedsky closed over him. He slept.
When he awakened, he thought he was in a place other than thebranch bed. He was in another world, so that for an instant hethought he might still be dreaming. The sun was gone, and all thelight and shadow. There were no black boles of live oaks, noglossy green of magnolia leaves, no pattern of gold lace wherethe sun had sifted through the branches of the wild cherry. Theworld was all a gentle gray, and he lay in a mist as fine asspray from a waterfall. The mist tickled his skin. It wasscarcely wet. It was at once warm and cool. He rolled over on hisback and it was as though he looked up into the soft gray breastof a mourning dove.
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