Kind One by Laird Hunt Read Free Book Online Page B

work or your rest then jumps into your head and runs around inside it like a spider. You think there isn’t much to a story like that and you think you’ve forgotten it, and a week later it is there. A year later it is there. Half a whole lifetime later it is there. Something like that gets in you and gets started and it doesn’t stop. Alcofibras said his grandmother, who came over to this country with iron on her ankles like the iron you could find in Linus Lancaster’s shed, could tell a story would put a nail through your foot. I had my stories from the grandson but didn’t walk any better after them for that.
    Last night I dreamed up I was sitting on a chair out in what’s left of Lucious Wilson’s barley field they’ve just harvested and didn’t know what I was doing there and was about to holler out for one of the younger ones I used to tell Rumpelstiltskin stories to to come and harvest me out of there, when I tried to move my foot and couldn’t and knew help or not this wasn’t the running dream and I wasn’t going anywhere.
    “Come on out now, Alcofibras,” I said.
    “Taking my time, just like you,” came his answer.
    I could see him. Just as young and dark and fresh as he was when he was still drawing his breath.

Linus Lancaster did not like for Alcofibras to tell his stories to us, but that is not why he got taken to his end. It was one week not long after I’d been named mother to the brood, and Linus Lancaster had brought Horace and Ulysses on the two-day ride to the big town to sell off some of the pigs he’d set loose and had the devil’s time herding up. He’d planned on just bringing Ulysses with him, but the pigs had turned ornery with their freedom and wouldn’t walk straight without sufficient encouraging, so Linus Lancaster took Horace away with him too. That very same evening we had a visitor, and when Alcofibras came back on ahead of him down the lane he passed me and Cleome and Zinnia and said, “That’s the Draper Man come to call.” And when all three of us had cried out, he said, without slowing his step, “Not tonight, and ain’t for you, that’s the Draper Man for me.”
    The Draper Man was one of Alcofibras’s stories about the man who comes to measure for the drapes, then has you step out the door with him to cut the cloth he will wrap you up in, then carries you off to your end. The man who came up the lane behind Alcofibras had on a top hat and purple britches. There were two of his help with him. I had Alcofibras take the help out to the barn and went inside the house with Mr. Bennett Marsden, as he said his name was, who was a friend of Linus Lancaster’s from his days in Louisville when he had liked to sing on the stage. I had Zinnia, whom I had struck across the face that morning with the heavy spoon, see to supper, and I had Cleome, whom I had slapped across the back that afternoon with a switch of pig hide, fetch a bottle. They went to their jobs without any word to Bennett Marsden, who sat in Linus Lancaster’s chair at the table and looked at them and said they had done grown up and transformed themselves into fillies.
    “That Alcofibras ain’t any more giant or any less ugly than he was, though,” Bennett Marsden said when he had his soup and whiskey. “He still tell all those stories?”
    “Have you heard Alcofibras’s stories?”
    “Tell you what, I’d like to hear another.”
    I sent the girls away and called for Alcofibras to come and stand by the table and tell a story to our guest. Alcofibras came in holding a potato in one hand and an onion in the other.
    “Put those things outside and tell Mr. Bennett Marsden a story. He has asked for one,” I said.
    Alcofibras was quiet a long minute. He had a way of being quiet that cooked at your patience. I was fixing to correct him on it and for not taking the vegetables outside when his eyes flicked up at Bennett Marsden and he asked if he wanted to hear the story of the potato or the