The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson: A Novel by Nancy Peacock

Author:Nancy Peacock [Nancy Peacock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501116353
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2017-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT DAY we broke more horses. Sedge had an endless supply, it seemed, of green-broke horses, horses he could get a saddle on but could not always ride. I rode them. I rode them that day and the next and the next as we waited for Miss Doreen to pass her last breath so we could put her in the ground.

Sedge divided his time between answering Miss Doreen’s calls, getting saddles on and off the horses I was intended to ride, and a never-ending list of chores. Over the time we stayed there I saw him hunting, cooking, boiling laundry and hanging it out, washing dishes, watering the pitiful garden out back of the barns, emptying Miss Doreen’s chamber pot, feeding the chickens, and feeding and grooming the horses. Occasionally I caught him standing still, looking out toward the horizon with a bucket in his hand or a saddle in his arms, just staring out into the scrubby flatlands that surrounded the Double H Ranch, looking, I thought, to anything that might hold a different life for him.

He had been the only hand on this ranch since news of the war’s end reached them, a good three or four months after the fact. Miss Doreen had been sick, off and on, for almost two years and her husband dead for one. There had been children of this union. Two were buried in the small plot next to their father, one dead of smallpox, the other died an infant. Two more, I learned, had been carried off by Indians.

Miss Doreen’s reedy voice crept out of the cabin often, always calling for Sedge. He could hear her from anywhere, even from the corrals with the horses thundering their hooves in the dirt. “Yesem,” he’d holler. “I comin’.” And he’d take off in a sprint. Her voice was surprisingly strong for a dying woman, and it did not weaken over the time we were there. After he’d reached the cabin I could hear her complaining, “What took you so long, Sedge?”

Sometimes Sedge simply rode away, out into the wild lands surrounding the ranch. He would be gone for hours, and while he was gone Mo and I would ignore Miss Doreen’s calls. When Sedge returned he did not say anything about his absence, but would always go straight to the cabin and check on her.

I once helped Sedge change the sheets on her bed so he could wash them. I discovered that I had been wrong about the cabin. It was not two rooms but one long one, Miss Doreen in her iron bed at one end, a round table beside the bed, and on the table, a huge globe lamp painted with a hunting scene. At the other end of the cabin, the fireplace, kettles and fry pans, a rocking chair, and a small table next to it. In between the two ends of the cabin were a braided rug, a trunk, the pallet where Sedge slept at night, and columns of dust motes drifting in dim shafts of sunlight from the little windows.

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