The Fruit of Stone by Mark Spragg

Author:Mark Spragg [Spragg, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-73937-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

When he climbed through the loft’s trapdoor and stepped out onto the floor it was bright as a doctor’s office. He squinted and blinked and stared into the lights. There were two wires strung through the rafters, for the length of the gambrel ceiling, with eight bare bulbs hanging from each wire.

He stood away from the top of the ladder and eased into a crowd of standing men. The men clapped their hands to the rhythm of the fiddle music and passed a pint of Ancient Age. He watched the three squares of dancers on the floor. There were four couples in each square. If he squinted, the whole big room turned into his mother’s garden in the wind. That’s the way the women’s bright skirts swayed and thrashed about their legs. Light, bright flowers, he thought.

Chester Lennon sawed at his fiddle and sang: “Pass those girls side by side. Turn them around and make it wide.”

His father danced with Anna Maris in the middle square, and his mother stood in the far corner and swayed to the cadence of the call. Her eyes were closed and her arms hugged her waist.

There were other women who weren’t dancing, but they sat or stood away from his mother, lined shoulder to shoulder on bales of first-cut hay, or against the loftwall.

His nose still ran from the Coke fizzing up in it, and he wiped at it with his hand and wiped his hand on his jeans.

Chester stood at the head of the loft on a sheet of plywood laid across a raft of hay bales. “Now pass them over to that gent over there. And around that gent without any hair.” Chester’s face was red and sweat ran into his eyes.

When he looked back at his mother she was coming diagonally across the loftfloor, coming toward him, and she was dancing. Her eyes were still closed and she still hugged herself, but her hips swayed to the fiddle music, and she cocked up a knee and swung out the foot and half-stepped—first with her right leg, once, twice, three times, and then with the left.

The square nearest her broke up and parted to let her through. The dancers stood and dropped their arms to their sides. They smiled at first and shuffled and then hunched their shoulders. The man nearest his mother circled an arm around his wife’s waist and turned her out of the way. Their faces fell blank as midday.

The women looked toward his father to see if the man would know what to do with his wife, but his father was laughing and still dancing with Anna Maris. His shirttail had come loose and flapped against his ass.

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