The Devil's Dream Read Online Free Page B

where I was and smoked a cigarette.
    I looked around good. Hit struck me how lonesome the cabin was, set back in the cedar trees thataway, despite her children a-playing all around the steps. Hit was kindly dark back in there, and the cold wind come a-blowing through them cedar trees with a sighing sound, a crying sound, real mournful-like. The feel of the forest was all around. With the leaves offen the trees, you could see how close the mountain rose up there behind the cabin, and how rocky and mean it looked. Now that is Lone Bald Mountain, ye see it over there, hit is not a pretty mountain, neither. They is a cropping-out of rocks yonder, right afore ye reach the bald where the ravens stay, and hit used to be in them days that bears was frequent on Lone Bald, too. Kate’s cabin was mighty close to the mountain, to my mind, and mighty far removed from the rest of usuns living around here.
    â€œJeremiah! Get me some water, honey!” Kate said, and the eldest boy run up to the spring with the bucket. They loved their mamma. You could jest tell it, and they was never any back talk nor squabbling amongst them. Them and Kate was all kids together, hit appeared.
    Jeremiah come back with the bucket, and Kate doused the fire. She licked the end of the sassafras stick she was stirring the apple butter with, and grinned at me. My heart liked to leap outen my chest. “This’ll eat real good,” she said, “come on over here and try it,” and I rose up like I was in a dream and went over there where she was. I felt like my legs was lead, but my heart was a-beating double time, and she helt out the stick and giggled, and I licked the apple butter offen it, and then I dipped the stick down and helt it fer her whilst she licked it. It was real hot and real sweet. It burned my tongue. I looked at Kate in the old black coat, and I looked at her raggedy younguns barefoot despite of the cold, and I listened to the wind a-moaning and a-sighing through them cedar trees, and a resolve took aholt of me.
    â€œKate Bailey,” I says, “how come you to stay over here this-away when yer man ain’t never home? You ought to have better,” says I, all hot in the face, and to her credit, Kate did not laugh at me.
    â€œWhy, Ira Keen!” she says. “Why, Ira.” And fer just a minute she laid her hand upside of my face. Fer just a minute she stopped stock-still and stared straight in my eyes. We stayed like that fer a while. The cold wind blowed her hair around.
    Then, “Moses needs me,” she says, real soft-like. “He needs me so much,” she says. Now I didn’t know nothing about that then, being nought but eighteen, but I do now. For need is the powerfullest tie that they is, it seems to me now, fer a woman in particular.
    But at the time Kate said it, it fair broke my heart. I reckon I got on my horse someway, and made it back acrost Paint Creek someway, but whether I carried Mamma any of that apple butter or not, I couldn’t tell ye. I do know I got knee-walking drunk that night out in the smokehouse, where Pappy thought he had hid his liquor so good, and Pappy whupped me fer it. To tell you the truth, I didn’t keer iffen he whupped me or not. I wanted him to whup me, iffen I couldn’t have Kate Malone. My heart was broke fer sure.
    Now this was what? Sixty, seventy year ago? And yet I can see her still a-standing by that cookfire in the wind, her skirts and her hair a-blowing, giving me that sassafras stick to lick. I see her rosy cheeks. And yet hit weren’t long after that that I taken Piney Wilfong down to Bee fer somebody’s wedding, and the axle broke and the horse run off, and there we was, out all night long, and hit was said I ought to marry her to make it right. Which I done. And brung her up here, and she was as good as gold to Dummy, and give me nine children to boot. Which is all gone now, finely and fectually. Two boys dead in the war and two