Speak to the Winds by Ruth Moore

Author:Ruth Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Islandport Press
Published: 2022-02-24T18:06:23+00:00

She was real fond of, or seemed to be.

And lying there, the fire warm—that old range he’d salvaged out of the Cloud house and cleaned the rust out of and blacked up—that was a corker, a real old-time cookstove, with a reservoir for hot water and an oven a man could put his stocking feet into, if he wanted to; them old-timers, they made it real comfortable—lying there, resting, Mary sprawled out along his side, he playing and singing with no clack to stop him; his money, forty-four dollars and seventy-seven cents, now, in the baking powder can on the shelf, and the kerosene lamp burning on the table to light him, and the place neat and sweet-smelling; Willard would begin to feel good again, the way he hadn’t for a long time; as if, someday, he might pull out of it, be a man again and not a mountain of misery.

Old songs came back to him he hadn’t thought of for years; one night he thought of one really to sing to Mary, like as if it was her song.

“Black is the color,” sang Willard, barely making heard the accompaniment on the accordion, so Mary’d be sure to like it. “Black is the color of my true love’s hair.”

This morning, he was partway through his breakfast—a good breakfast, the kind he liked, eggs and three-four thick slices of ham and bread and gravy and doughnuts, boughten doughnuts, of course, but still doughnuts, and coffee—before he noticed the folded paper somebody had slid under the crack in the door.

Why, walked right over that, times untold, this morning, and never seen it.

He leaned over and picked up the paper. It was from Harriet, he saw, her writing, the Palmer method she’d been so good at, better than him and George, when they were in school, on a folded piece of grocery-store paper bag. He thought, with a little jerk at his chest, well, they’ve come round, they want me back home now.

But the note said:

If you ain’t going to put in towards running the house, you ain’t got any right to steal the milk. I need all of it to make butter to sell so’s George and I can get along. This is a fair warning. Stay away from my milk, Willard P. Lowden.

Elbridge stepped up on the rickety platform which made a sort of back porch to Willard’s shack, and thumped with his boot toe on the door. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have knocked, nobody did hereabouts, but he had his hands full—in one, a crocus bag of turnips, and in the other, a basket of cooked food that Jess had sent down.

“It won’t do any good,” he had said to Jess, when she suggested it. “The way Willard feels, he’ll probably give it the heave-ho off the wharf.”

“We can try,” Jess said. “At least, we can make the motion.”

For three weeks, she had watched Willard go stumping up past the house each day, headed for the Lowden barn, and then,

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