It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank.
After that I was bigger, older.
Then I would wait until they all went to sleep so I could lie with my shirt-tail up, hearing them asleep, feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my parts and wondering if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too, had been doing it perhaps for the last two years before I could have wanted to or could have.
Pa's feet are badly splayed, his toes cramped and bent and warped, with no toenail at all on his little toes, from working so hard in the wet in homemade shoes when he was a boy.
Beside his chair his brogans sit.
They look as though they had been hacked with a blunt axe out of pig-iron.
Vernon has been to town.
I have never seen him go to town in overalls.
His wife, they say.
She taught school too, once.
I fling the dipper dregs to the ground and wipe my mouth on my sleeve.
It is going to rain before morning.
Maybe before dark.
"Down to the barn," I say.
"Harnessing the team."
Down there fooling with that horse.
He will go on through the barn, into the pasture.
The horse will not be in sight: he is up there among the pine seedlings, in the cool.
Jewel whistles, once and shrill.
The horse snorts, then Jewel sees him, glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows.
Jewel whistles again; the horse comes dropping down the slope, stiff-legged, his ears cocking and flicking, his mis-matched eyes rolling, and fetches up twenty feet away, broadside on, watching Jewel over his shoulder in an attitude kittenish and alert.
"Come here, sir," Jewel says.
He moves.
Moving that quick his coat, bunching, tongues swirling like so many flames.
With tossing mane and tail and rolling eye the horse makes another short curvetting rush and stops again, feet bunched, watching Jewel.
Jewel walks steadily toward him, his hands at his sides.
Save for Jewel's legs they are like two figures carved for a tableau savage in the sun.
When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and slashes down at Jewel.
Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the up-reared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake.
For an instant before the jerk comes onto his arms he sees his whole body earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-umber, until he finds the horse's nostrils and touches earth again.
Then they are rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs, with lowered head; Jewel with dug heels, shutting off the horse's wind with one hand, with the other patting the horse's neck in short strokes myriad and caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.
They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning.
Then Jewel is on the horse's back.
He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse.
For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion.
They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again.
"Well," Jewel says, "you can quit now, if you got a-plenty."
Inside the barn Jewel slides running to the ground before the horse stops.
The horse enters the stall, Jewel following.
Without looking back the horse kicks at him, slamming a single hoof into the wall with a pistol-like report.
Jewel kicks him in the stomach; the horse arches his neck back, crop-toothed; Jewel strikes him across the face with his fist and slides on to the trough and mounts upon it.
Clinging to the hay-rack he lowers his head and peers out across the stall tops and through the doorway.
The path is empty; from here he cannot even hear Cash sawing.
He reaches up and drags down hay in hurried armsful and crams it into the rack.
"Eat," he says.
"Get the goddamn stuff out of sight while you got a chance, you pussel-gutted bastard.
You sweet son of a bitch," he says.
Jewel
It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box.
Where she’s got to see him.