Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online

but they wouldn’t laugh because both have perceived in one shimmering instant before the fact of her wearing that hat is established, the still alive girl and the undefeated kingdom of their family.
    She took her place on the bench and looked straight ahead over the mule’s rump. Jack Penfield went into the house and came out with the last thing, his new bolt-action Savage whose stock was oiled smooth and whose barrel was blue steel, and he placed this across his lap as he sat up behind the mule and took the reins.
    And so with a lurch of the wheels they turned into the traffic of wagonswinding down through the canyons. In front of the Colorado Supply Company two sheriff’s deputies stood on the porch to watch the procession. They had Winchesters cradled in their arms. Some of the families passing them made loud remarks. Some of them sang their union song. Most of them looked straight ahead and went on down the street into the descent of the prairie, too cold or too realistic to bother with the trappings of the spirit.
    The rain was changing its nature, getting heavy turning hard, and Warren sitting cross-legged on top of a bureau felt the sting of ice, like steel pellets. He held out his hand and received a particle of hail. He put up his denim collar. He was facing forward but for some reason swiveled on his rump and looked back at the street just as the wagon behind picked up the pace to fill in the slack in the parade and it was she in her dress of tulips faded sitting up on her wagon on a stool like a princess borne in her palanquin, her body moving forward and back, her head moving in the lag of her body’s rhythm and he smiled and raised his hand and she smiled and raised hers, and they stared at each other their bodies gently bending and straightening in the rhythm of the mules’ pace, the wheels creaking in the mud the traces rattling like ancient music of fanfares and the two of them staring at each other like royal lovers in a procession toward their investiture under the hardening rain through the canyon of slag going down to the plains.

 
    T hinking about that girl standing in front of the mirror and holding up the white dress on the train gliding past me out of sight, I came along the track before I even knew it into the main street of a mountain village.
    It was noon on the church tower. A pretty lakeside village with a general store a gas pump a white hotel with rocking chairs on the porch, a bait-and-tackle shop. I wanted to keep going but there was a cop on the corner. Casually I crossed the street and went into a diner and ordered the baked ham and brown beans in a crock and coffee. When I finished I ordered the same thing again. The waitress smiled and the chef himself looked out through the porthole of the kitchen door to see this prize customer.
    I got out of that village without trouble resuming my walk just beyond the station crossing, following the rails that forked off into a narrower cut of trees. The track went through some woods circled around a small mountain lake and then it started up a grade a long slow winding grade, I was not already in love with her but in her field of force, what I thoughtI felt like was some stray dog following the first human being it happened to see.
    In the late afternoon I came to a miniature station house of creosoted brown logs complete with ticket window and potbellied stove. It was empty. Out the back door was the sidetracked private railroad car.
    I climbed aboard. Each room had a narrow door with brass handle opening onto the corridor going down one side along the windows.
    Here was the room of grand appointments where the men were drinking a card table of green baize and leather with receptacles for poker chips, a bar with bottles and glasses in fitted recesses, a Persian rug of rich red tone, paneling of dark wood, books in the shelves The Harvard Classics. A faint odor of cigar smoke. I brushed the tassels of the lampshades with the back of my