Half Wild Read Online Free

grew up on, past the houses where the people I grew up with lived and live. I pass Alice Tucker’s house, and look this time not only at its falling-in shape, silhouetted against the sky, one light on in the kitchen window, but also down toward Silver Creek, where Terry Miner learned to fish when he was a boy.
    One night after my mother and brother and I had moved into an apartment in Nelson, my father came by. He knocked at the door and stood out there in the dark calling our mother’s name up toward our windows. Lock the doors, my mother whispered. And pray for his soul. We did. We lay in bed listening to him out there calling her name— Mona!— and singing fragments of old love songs, once in a while simply howling.
    I roll down my window and keep driving, past moonlit trees and fields and open land, the land my husbandwants to buy, the land I could help him buy, the trees that could become lumber, and feel the dangerous and frightening pull of some new, or old, kind of life—drunk, hopeless, pine-pitched—calling.
    And then, when it is late, past midnight, I drive north and a little east, and pull up my paved driveway, and turn off my car, and look up at the safe, bright lights of my home. I walk in the front door and close it behind me. Ron is there, rising from the couch and walking toward me, his brow furrowed, his eyes soft with worry.
    â€œWhere were you?” he asks quietly.
    â€œNowhere,” I say. “Just my dad’s. I was just at my dad’s.” And then Ron takes me in his pale, thin arms and holds me loosely, and just like that I slip back into the shape of my life. I smell his clean, washed body, and know I will go on buying land and helping cut up and clean up what is wild out there, and old, and unseemly. I close my eyes and know my father will die someday, and with him that wild and unsettling hunger to go deeper, and deeper yet into the heart of the woods.

3
WINGS, 1989
    That day in July my mom came out of the house, wiped her soapy hands on her thighs, and told me to get my lazy bum up off the grass and go weed the peas. She wore rolled-up blue jeans, a plaid cotton blouse, and a red bandana that tied her dark hair back from her face. Her toenails were caked with dirt and needed cutting.
    â€œDon’t want to,” I said. My dad had been gone on a job for a week, and it was just the two of us. In the sun the temperature read ninety; bugs swarmed around my skin and flies landed intermittently on my thighs and knees.
    â€œKatie, how’d you get to be so lazy?” she said, squinting off toward the hills that used to belong to my dad’s parents but had since been sold, and then started walking alone through the tall grass down to the garden. I watched her shoulder blades moving under her blouseand went back to the library book I was reading. It was about a girl who lived in a clean house in the suburbs with lots of rooms and windows. The girl wrote stories, and the book was about those stories she wrote and all those windows. I wanted to be like her: unencumbered, surrounded by light. In one story she wrote about girls who turned into birds: hawks and ravens and buzzards and crows. They could fly anywhere they wanted to go. You knew, reading, that the girl who wrote the stories was free, too. You could feel it in your bones. But I couldn’t concentrate anymore, with my tired mom walking down to the garden alone.
    I felt a trickle of sweat slip down my spine and thought about those weeds—tall, green, stringy—crowding out the tomatoes and peas and carrots and beans. I thought about our basement full of empty canning jars collecting dust and our Datsun with a busted starter. After a few minutes I got up and went down the hill too, knelt in front of the carrots and pigweed. My mom didn’t say a thing, just looked at me sideways for a moment and smiled, then went back to the peas.
    We lived in a house that didn’t have many windows,