Kind One by Laird Hunt Read Free Book Online

there at them, I knew they weren’t in there with him beyond the flesh God had seen fit to drape them in, and that instead they were out twisting their own daisies and turning circles in the fields with me.
    Yes, that first night I thought that.

It wasn’t long after those visits started that Linus Lancaster turned his pigs free. He’d had them in their pens and had Horace and Ulysses build them more pens and the herd had flourished, and we had eaten of it until there was pig dripping out of our pores, and there had been the good Lord’s years of that. Then one afternoon he walked out and opened the gates and forbade anyone from closing them up again or slopping the pigs to tempt them to stay, and from that day on we had pigs everywhere.
    “I had to be square with my dream,” Linus Lancaster told me after he had done it. “Having the pigs was the smaller portion of it. I needed to see them let loose and people the earth.”
    “They are your pigs and this is your land and everything in it is yours, Husband,” I said.
    Linus Lancaster turned to me and smiled when I had made this remark. This was at a supper. There was stuck pig spread before us. Pig milk and molasses in our cups. There wasn’t a bit that was lacking. Since he’d been in at them he’d had Cleome and Zinnia sit down to table with us.
    “What you say is true, Wife,” he said. He had his bottle beside him. The bottle was filled with what Ulysses made out of a still he kept behind the barn. You could smell the concoction through the bottle glass, and once I saw a sparrow take two wet pecks of it and fall over dead.
    “We are a family,” Linus Lancaster said. “We four of us right here and the boys. I am the head of the family, and that is right and proper, but you, Wife, are its mother. The Lord in his mansion above has decreed it that you will not carry for him, not for him nor for me. He has said it that your duty is otherwise. You, Wife, the Lord has written in his tablet, are mother to these girls. You are mother to us all.”
    Linus Lancaster took a drink out of his bottle and belched his benediction out at us. Not a one of us said a word. Linus Lancaster had almost put me through the door I was leaning against the day before when I had not greeted him with what he had called the due respect. Cleome and Zinnia had to my knowledge not spoken above a whisper since Linus Lancaster’s visits had commenced, and if they said anything at that moment it was thrown out on their breath to the untouched plates of pork and black-eyed peas that lay fly-worried before them.
    Not ten minutes before Linus Lancaster had corrected me about my respect, I had stood by those girls at their bath. Linus Lancaster said that anyone lived in his house would have a regular bath, and here they were at theirs. Zinnia had been pouring the water onto Cleome and the water had streamed off the bubbles Cleome had wiped onto herself. The bubbles had followed the water down Cleome’s back and run white and ropey over her thighs and calves. She was bent and reaching for her towel when I slapped her. Then I slapped Zinnia. They both of them just looked at me. There wasn’t anything beyond the bucket Zinnia was holding or I would have taken it to them. When I slapped Cleome I could feel that the water Zinnia had poured on her was cold. That they had pulled it up from the well. From that dark hole in the earth. When I had my bath the water had been healed of its chill. One of the two of them heated it for me at the stove. One of them poured and the other took a cloth to me. There were bubbles on Cleome’s ankles. She wasn’t shivering. I found myself wanting to slap them again, so I did. I slapped until my hand hurt, and then I ran into the house and Linus Lancaster came down the corridor.
    “Wife,” he said.
    I didn’t answer. After he had pushed me hard enough that one of the boards in the door cracked he went and stood in the yard and watched Cleome and watched Zinnia who