The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

Author:Robert Hicks [HICKS, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9780759514430
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2005-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

The whirligigs were preposterous. John marveled at how much junk and energy had gone into making them. Blades made of old rusted tin sheeting caught the wind and spun long wooden rods, hand-carved, which in turn moved the diminutive wooden figures at the other end in all manner of ways. There was the wooden man ceaselessly bending over with his bucket to scoop water, there was the preacher pounding his pulpit with the same fist, over and over and over again, and there were the two little men facing each other with shovels, each digging while the other tossed the imaginary dirt over his shoulder. There was a witch at her cauldron and a dog snapping at a runaway’s heels. Each whirligig faced into the wind, and at least a hundred of varying sizes—some small enough to fit in John’s palm, others bearing figures the size of midgets—cluttered the yard. There was no escaping the wind at Miss Eloisa’s house, John reckoned. Even if you had wanted to.

The house itself was like every other in Blood Bucket—improvised, improbable. It was tin, every square inch of it. Although John knew there must be wood beneath, the tin facade looked entirely unnatural, like something coughed out whole from one of those big, black-smoke factories he’d read about in Harper’s Weekly. It would not have surprised him if the house itself was attached to a spindle and spun around if the wind was strong enough. It did not seem the sort of place a person would live in; it was the sort of place one might store things.

John walked up to the door, which was also covered in tin but punched with small holes in the shape of a giant rooster. He knocked and heard only a murmur behind the door. He waited and knocked again. He thought he heard moaning.

He opened the door, and rows of jars winked at him from every wall. The beams that held the roof on were exposed, black from soot, and ran the length of the small room. There was a table in the slap dead center of the room, and a figure sat at each end of it. In all four corners of the room John saw piles of wild things, the reaching and weaving tendrils of roots taken whole out of the ground, redolent of damp Tennessee soil ground out by the slip of glaciers, the beating of the wind, the trodding of feet. Other roots hung from the ceiling joists. Under the room’s only window, on the left, stood a small table bearing a pile of chicken feathers upon it, neatly gathered. The next thing John noticed was the flash of two sets of eyes, black and white all at once, as they took him in.

“Hello, Mariah.”

He expected Mariah to be shocked, and maybe a little afraid of him discovering her, but neither emotion passed across her face. Nothing passed across her face. Both Mariah and Miss Eloisa looked at him, and he could

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