Lime Creek by Joe Henry Read Free Book Online Page A

little boys.
    And at that same time my memory of Elizabeth, our mother, is always of her cooking all day. And the smellsof it building and carrying us in a fever of expectation until it would reach a kind of fragrant crescendo that by the time we would finally sit down to Christmas dinner would have nearly exhausted all our senses. Her having to stop in the midst of her chores to see that we were bundled up enough against the cold and then ushering us toward the door with Lonny taking us each by the hand. You boys can walk up towards Doris’s to see those Christmas lights, she says, but I want you home again before it gets dark please.
    We wanna ride Blue, Whitney says. The biggest animal that Whitney and I were allowed to be around. A great big sixteen-and-a-half-hand blue roan gelding as gentle as a long-legged old grandfather who had to be wary of where he placed his feet so that he would do nothing to jeopardize that unhurried gait of his, tired and knobbly but still eventually getting him where he figured he needed to go. And so solicitously careful when we were about him that in later years I often wondered if he had gained an instinct for us as being small two-legged creatures somehow akin to the phantom sons and grandsons never yet birthed into being but who still may have lived in his imagination behind that singular and imperturbable regard of his that was always on his greying face, bespeaking a boundless kind-eyed forbearance thatsomehow in the ancient way of the beast loved the young, the foals and the puppies and the little boys too.
    And Elizabeth says, Not today boys. You mind that barn, Lonny, and be back before it’s dark. And Lonny says, Yes’m. And then we’re bumping and shoving each other along the frozen road that’s become the bottom of a topless tunnel between story-high snowbanks, eventually crossing both snowed-over cattleguards and then the culvert where the buried creek runs along that side of the ranch.
    And then it would be dark and we’d finally leave the house to go down to the barn, and the sky behind the high country would just barely yet hold the very last of the light so that if you didn’t think to watch for it you’d miss it, the day’s end. There’d be four or five pickup trucks parked below the barn, and my remembrance is always of a crystal-clear moonless night with the temperature already below zero and the snow crunching so loud under our boots that you could even hear the steps of the other people and their kids walking up from where they’d left their vehicles.
    And the stars by then, the stars seemed so big in the sky that you’d think you could almost hear them too like the burning of distant torches if you were to stop and really listen. There was this one huge one in the east inthe winter that shone with different colors, and it stayed there all through the cold. Whitney and I assumed it to be the same star that all the stories talked about, but Lonny told us sometime later that it was in the constellation of the Dog. And we liked knowing that because our lives down here on the ground were so intertwined with animals that it only seemed natural for the stars to have a similar frame of reference too.
    You could hear Toebowman’s guitar from inside the barn when you were still a little ways off, Bradley Bowman’s uncle Tobin who everyone called Toebowman as if his two names first and last were really one name put together. The sound of the guitar in the delicate clarity of the newborn night made everybody quiet as we approached, the loveliness of it so achingly simple and pure from out of the whelming darkness like an earth-bred accompaniment to a universe cut from glass. With the crunching snow and that simple human refrain on this side of the cold, and the stars so familiar and yet so distant on the other side.
    Whitney and I and Lonny would all have fallen into that hush as we walked, and Elizabeth would squeeze my hand in my mitten without saying anything. And I