Kind One Read Online Free Page B

but muscle from one long end of him to the other. You could see like he was shouting it that my father would have wanted for nothing better than to pull off his wooden foot and take a turn at Linus Lancaster with it. I could see his mind had already hefted it over his head and brought it down. Instead he said, “We rode that cart five days to see your mansion and your fair fields, Son-in-law.”
    “The mansion,” said Linus Lancaster, lighting up his pipe, “lacks nothing but the building. And as for my fields, they are fair. I will show them to you. They are the fairest in all of Charlotte County.”
    My father said nothing to this but pulled out his own pipe and reached into the bag of tobacco Linus Lancaster held out to him. For her part, my mother saw Horace and Ulysses tending to the horses and Alcofibras walking by with a well bucket and Zinnia working at the stove and Linus Lancaster with all his muscles and said, “You have a fine number of help. I expect it is just the number you will need for your new home when it is built.”
    They stayed with us for a week. My mother fussed alongside me at whatever I was doing and my father clucked his tongue, shook his head at the pigs, and took long cripple walks in the woods. When I was a girl I had liked to play at following behind my father, ghosting along in his tracks as he went his ways, and I took a turn at it on the second day of that visit. My father went his crippling path over the bridge and into the woods, and when he had got past the first hickories I stepped out after him. I’d been helping hang linens, but I just left the girls to their work and went walking. It wasn’t any trick to follow. My father’s wooden foot was narrow at the bottom, and when there was any wet to the ground it would sink on in and pull out clumps. I followed the clumps and divots and by and by, even though he’d had a start on me, I caught my father up. When I was little I had liked to holler out at him when I got close, and he had liked to pretend he didn’t know I’d been behind him, even though he had known it all along. When I saw my father on up a little ways, I thought, “And now I will holler and now he will turn and act like I’ve scared him, and now I will be back home in the goose pond again.”
    I opened my mouth and got fixed to holler, “Hey, Papa,” even though I didn’t know if that was what I still ought to call him, and then I saw that my father was not alone. That he was standing in the shade of a hickory with Alcofibras. That he was talking to him and nodding his head, and Alcofibras was talking back to him and nodding his own. They talked, and that holler I had planned fell out of my mouth and died its death on the dirt floor, and I turned around as quiet as I could go, but when I looked over my shoulder they were both of them looking the whites of their eyes at me. I don’t know why, but when I saw that they had seen me I gave out a kind of squawk and took it in my head to run. I ran so hard and so fast that I lost my breath and got turned around and might have spent the night in the wood except that after a time here came Alcofibras. He didn’t say a word and didn’t stop, just looped a loop at the top of his walk and, when he saw that I was going to follow him and not run off again, went back the way he had come.

I am old like I said and can barely bend over to see my boot, but here is a dream in which I run: Linus Lancaster is out by his pigs and Lucious Wilson is standing next to him. They are talking and they turn and look at me. I can’t move and they turn away and I can move again. Then I run. I run out the front door of this house here in Indiana but out into the yard of that other in Kentucky. I run up the road to the stone bridge there, then I am in the barley field here. I stumble and fall by the oak tree there. Linus Lancaster is leaning against the tree. He is shrugging his shoulders and easing some itch he has. I raise myself up and he