Content Literacy Fun

The fields were greening up and the big apple tree in the front yard was full of white blossoms.  The late afternoon sun filtered through the trees in the lane cast streamers of light against the barn.  In the distance I could hear the geese quarrel.  Perhaps Solomon was casting stones in their end of the pond.  Perhaps the ganders were squabbling over the females.

The nights were still cool and the bees that had been so busy in the apple tree just a few hours earlier had fled to their warm hive.  Only a year ago Solomon would have been in the tree rustling the blossoms to the ground and bringing scolds from me.  He had grown so this year, his legs lengthening and his feet striking out at the bottom of his pantlegs, forever seeming to burst his shoes.  His feet were well past his cousin Jordy's and soon Solomon would have to wear his father's cast offs, if they held. 

The smell of rabbit roasting in the dutch oven caught my nose and I returned to the stove.  Soon there would be new potatoes.  But the fiddle heads were up and would provide a taste of green for tonight's supper.  I was hungry for dandelion fritters and thought they might be nice for dinner the next day.  In a few weeks the sparrow grass along the fence rows would be ready to pick.  Solomon would plant peas and lettuce soon, and there would be mushrooms.

I looked around for Solomon.  There was no sight of the boy, which was unusual. His appetite had grown faster than his legs and he always seemed to be pestering for a buscuit or two befor supper to tide him over. 

Tom walked in, his hair full of straw and dust.  He took the rag from the hook above the wash pan and wiped his face.

"That was a clean cloth, Tom Radcliffe.  And now it's dirty.  Go take you and your dirt outside and wash yourself up before you walk into my clean kitchen," I said as I pointed toward the doorway into the back yard.

"They're recruiting soldiers for the army, Grace," he said.  "Maybe they're looking for a sergeant."

"What do you mean they're recruiting soldiers?"

"For the north," said Tom, bending over and running his fingers through his straw filled hair.  Little bits fell onto the ground. 

"They just declared war last week," I said.  "They don't need soldiers yet.  It's planting time."  There had been talk of little else but the coming war in town on Saturday. But everyone agreed that nothing would happen for months.  I suspected that as soon as both sides decided that war was the only answer, they would end their posturing and talk sense.

"Nope, Lincoln wants  75,000 troops.  Where's Solly?"

"They're recruting in town you said?"  My heart fluttered a bit the way it sometimes did at night before I went to sleep.  Tom looked at me.  His eyes squinted a bit, the way they did when he was sizing up clouds on the horizon or reading the wind on a hot stormy evening. 

Then he moved quickly toward the gate punching it open, almost ripping it from its weathered hinges. His stride lengthened into a run when he hit the road.  I couldn't keep up with him, but it didn't matter.  I gathered my skirt about me and raced my legs down the ruts and around the bend onto the market road.  Tom's legs had already disturbed a clutch of geese and they scolded past me, extending their long necks and beaks to nip at my petticoat.  Had I not felt the urgency of fear in my I would have kicked the one that found its mark on my stocking, but it was not the time to argue with geese. 

I remember when my father fell in his tracks on the hill leading to the west pasture.  I was 12 and pounding biscuits for my mother.  I was looking out the small window of the tenant house we lived in, daydreaming about the doll May Beth Mills had gotten from her grandmother and how angry I was that she bragged about that doll.  And then my father fell, face down, in the pasture.  And I ran toward him, feeling the dread pound itself into my heard with each thud of my foot on the ground.  I remember my mother passing me, her skirts tucked high, her legs striking out before her, strong, eating the distance between her and Father.  Her breath rushed out of her in explosive grunts each time her foot struck the ground.  And then I heard nothing.  The world went silent.  I didn't hear my own feet pound into the meadow.  I no longer heard my mother's breath explode with each step.