The Mourning Hours Read Online Free

youngest, reassuring them. “Hey, now, baby,” I heard him say, and the calves responded by tottering forward in their pens, all awkward legs and clunky hooves.
    I waited for Dad in the doorway of the barn with Kennel rubbing against my legs. From this perspective, slightly elevated from the rest of our property, it seemed as if all we needed was a moat and we would have our own little kingdom. Our land, all one hundred-and-sixty acres of it, stretched away farther than I could see into the deepening darkness. On the north side of the property the corn grew fiercely, shooting inches upward in a single day. Beyond the rows of corn was our neighbor Mel Wegner, beloved because he let me feed apples to his two retired quarter horses, King Henry and Queen Anne. In the opposite direction, our cow pasture joined up with what had been the Warczaks’ property, until Jerry had had to sell most of it to cover legal and medical expenses. These days, the bank rented him part of the property for a chicken farm. Sometimes, when the wind carried just right, I could hear the confusion of a thousand chickens pushing against each other. Other times, days in a row might pass without us seeing any of our human neighbors.
    Our house, beaming now with yellow rectangles of light from almost every window, was set back from the road by a rolling green lawn that Grandpa Hammarstrom tended faithfully. Peeking behind it, closer to the road, was Grandpa’s house, newly remodeled to be in every way more efficient than ours. On the east end, our property ended in a thick patch of trees that started just about at one end of the county and ended at the other, a green ribbon of forest that more or less tended to itself. In the middle of it all was our barn, which Johnny had been painstakingly repainting, plus our towering blue silo, the sleek white milk tank.
    “Ready, kiddo?” Dad asked, appearing behind me. He cupped his hand around the back of my head, and my silky, tangled blond hair fell through his fingers.
    “Race you,” I said, suddenly filled with the night’s unspent energy, and started back. Dad was a superior racing companion, pushing me to go faster and farther, but never getting more than a step ahead of me. We arrived breathless at the back door. Mom was alone at the sink now, and she turned to grin at us.
    “Another tie,” Dad announced.
    When I thought about this day later, I wished I could have scooped up the whole scene in one of Mom’s canning jars, so I could keep all of us there forever. I knew it wouldn’t last for that long, though—the fireflies I captured on summer nights had to be set free or else they were nothing more than curled-up husks by morning. But I had always loved the way they buzzed frantically in the jar, their winged, beetlelike bodies going into a tizzy with even the slightest shake. If I could have done it somehow, I would have captured my own family in the same way, all of us safe and together, if only for a moment.

four
    S uddenly, I was seeing Stacy Lemke everywhere. A few days after that first softball game, I saw her at Dewy’s, where I was sucking down a chocolate shake while I waited for Mom to place an order next door at Gaub’s Meats. The instant Stacy stepped through the door with two other girls, my heart performed this funny extra beat.
    “Hey, Kirsten!” she called loudly, and everyone in the whole café turned for a second to look at me.
    I beamed back at her. She put her arm around me in a quick hug, as if we had always known each other. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt, a denim skirt and sandals, and her reddish hair, hanging loose around her shoulders, smelled like gardenias.
    She gestured behind her. “These are my sisters, Joanie and Heather.”
    I smiled shyly into the whipped cream residue of my shake. Heather was in the sixth grade at Watankee Elementary, and I’d seen her on the playground, walloping a tetherball over her victims’ heads. She was basically a giant. Joanie,