Lime Creek by Joe Henry Read Free Book Online Page B

could see her face in my mind without having to look up at her. We’d all be still as we entered the barn as if it were reallya church of some kind, and as I remember how it always made me feel I really can’t imagine any difference.
    In the far corner where the wall met the first stall was where Spencer would have set up the tree that late the day before he had cut and drug down from somewhere off the high ridge that looks over the lower part of the ranch. Lonny went with him on horseback, and watching from the parlor window we saw them walking their horses out of the growing dark with Lonny’s horse first and Spencer’s a step or two behind with the tree tied off at his saddlehorn and dragging over the surface of the snow.
    And I remember the candles. The whole tree seemed full of lit candles. So many of them that their light seemed to push back the darkness when we’d come into the barn from out of the hard cold black night. And the shocking pristine vision of that candlelight would be like a miracle to me when I’d first see it. And then I’d see that all amongst the candles were hung apples and carrots and other fruits and vegetables wherever the broad boughs of the tree would support them.
    Haybales would be positioned on the earthen floor for places to sit in front of the tree and also to separate the two or three horses, all groomed and with a tiny red or green knot of ribbon tied in their forelocks, who werefree to walk about on the other side where Spencer had placed hay and grain for them to eat. Several yearling calves would be settled in two of the stalls and a number of weanling lambs that Spencer had trucked over from Ollie Wheeler’s early that morning in two others.
    Toebowman would be sitting on one of the bales and playing and humming along as he picked at the strings of his instrument with those gloves that leave the fingertips exposed. We thought he’d cut off the ends of his gloves so he’d be able to play his guitar in the cold, and I remember thinking about cutting the ends of my mittens too but seemed to forget before actually getting it done. There’d be platters of cookies and pitchers of juice for the kids and eggnog for the folks and glasses arranged on trays that were set on top of three bales that were piled one on the other against the near wall.
    The kids’d break away from the folks and the folks’d cluster on either side of Toebowman with handshakes all around and all the good wishes spoken back and forth from out of that shared existence of people living close enough to the earth to be kin to the various other families of beings who lived there also in that harsh and generally unforgiving environment that made us all—the Bowmans the next ranch over and nearly four miles away, and Ollie Wheeler and his family and hands andtheir families nearly fifteen miles off to the south—all neighbors. Folks who worked much longer hours than their work-animals, from dark to dark and most always beyond, day after day without heed of arbitrary divisions of time into weeks or months, and so telling the passage of it by the building and diminishing of the light and the waxing and waning of the moon and perhaps too by the awesome concentric circles of the fiery and yearning stars.
    And closer to the heart, by the births and deaths of all the creatures given and taken from life around and about our high clear place on the earth that was rimmed by the near hills on one side and the far mountains on the other. Winged and two- and four-legged and silver swimmers and arrowlike flyers and runners horned and not with cloven feet and some with ten toes. The peach-fuzz turning to whiskers on the sons of man and coming up from the barn some warm Saturday evening seeing the gangly little girl you’d known right from seed suddenly appearing on the porch like her own lovely ghost waiting and then hugging you around your neck that had to still smell of the horse you’d been shoeing and saying, Your