The Dark Closet Read Online Free Page B

Crossett’s estimation: three sandwiches’ worth of mayonnaise thrown out every day by the average person. Crossett could not abide waste.
    Twynne’s children had scrambled through the fence to join Crossett’s in the field. The two men stood silently for a few minutes watching them throwing snowballs and tackling each other, despite the depth of the snow.
    “How is Anne?” Twynne broke the silence.
    “Fine, thanks. Just tired of the basement.”
    “I suppose it’s boring for her.”
    “Not so bad. She reads a lot anyway, so now she’s reading even more. The only danger is running out of books before the roads are clear again. How’s Maragret?”
    “H appy as long as the children are around. She’s probably bored to death now because they’re out here with me. There just isn’t much to do with the  current and telephone off.” Twynne paused. “You don’t look very well. Are you all right?”
    Crossett looked up from toe ing his cigarette butt into the snow, leaving a charcoal smudge in the white, and smiled wanly. “I’m just tired, I think. I haven’t slept well since the storm began. It’s not very restful trying to sleep in a coat and I’m cold no matter what. I wake up at the slightest sound. We all must be having the same problem, because I wake up and hear talking. I think the children keep each other awake—we have them all sleeping in Maude’s room, you know, for warmth, in the two double beds with their snow suits on.”
    “They must be put ting up a real racket, Crossett, because Maude’s room is at the other end of the house.”
    “Yes, well, you know children.”
    “Well,” sighed Twynne, “you know we can get to a doctor if we have to.”
    “I’m fine, Twynne. I don’t need a doctor.” Then he motioned to the children. “ We’d better follow them. They’re headed for the barn.”
    Twynne, a tall, lithe man, slipped through the fence and covered more distance with his long legs than Crossett, helping to brush away the snow as the children drew up the wooden rail that bolted the door. Inside, it was dusky. The snow lay heavily upon the roof, whose peeping holes were now solidly covered. Along one side the snow had drifted almost half the height of the barn, barring the light and leaving it quiet and dark within. The children ran into the stripping room, always a thrill in winter since they were forbidden entrance during the summer and fall months when the sharecroppers were at work there. A flap of tarp hung languidly over the small glass window in the stripping room, blown slightly now and then as the air moved through a shattered pane. The room smelled thickly and heavily of tobacco and kerosene from the crooked stove in one corner and the fine powder of dried tobacco that had mingled long ago with the hay covering the floor. A few empty pint bottles were strewn through the hay, their greasy labels unintelligible now to literate and illiterate alike.
    “What’s this , Daddy?” asked Sophie, picking up one of the smeary, resin-dabbled bottles.
    “Put that down right now,” Crossett ordered. “It’s filthy.”
    The boys wer e in the barn proper playing Robin Hood with tobacco sticks, busily ostracizing the girls. They ran about jumping up to hang from the blackened hand-hewn beams that lodged the tiers of poles from which the tobacco hung through fall to early winter. A wind picked up outside, and the roof made an odd noise, as if laboring under its load of snow.
    “Time to go,” yelled Crossett, the alarm in his voice. It would not be the first time a barn roof caved in from too much snow. Outside the wind was blowing at a steady pace, its fifteen degrees stiffening lips and cheeks.
    “I think we’d better all get back, Twynne. I don’t know what this wind means, but I hope it’s not more snow.”
    “If it is, we’ll meet again after it stops. You really ought to get a transistor radio, Crossett,” he called as he turned to go. “It’d be some connection