Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill Read Free Book Online Page B

play with. All the kids in school had their own new hog bladder footballs, and we played games of English soccer on the stony, barren school ground.

    In winter I sometimes went out early and walked the fields of our farm alone. I liked to go on mornings of fresh snowfall, when all the meadows were trackless and hushed with white. I would walk up through Captain Jim's old orchard and when I got near the moss-gray trees along the rail fence, Iwould begin to see the little animal tracks and would follow them up and down along the edge of the woods.
    There were the triangular prints of the rabbits, or the little field mice tracks like delicate lace woven across the snow. Sometimes there might be fox tracks, one track in front of the other in a straight line. After a warm night, there might be skunk tracks, like little human footprints but with a soft white dab where the tail had brushed the snow; and up in the bushes the bird tracks made dark little stitches mending the hill. There were also the round cat tracks, no claws showing, the soft, retracted feline tread; and one morning I saw blood on the snow.
    Sometimes I could feel the others close around me, down in their little burrows in the earth: the gray, sleeping wood mice; the little striped ground squirrels; and the soft curled-up rabbits, the snoring old groundhogs, and the ring-tailed raccoons. Then the silence would come down, as though it fell on our meadows from the high whiteness of Pinnacle Rock.

Neighborhood Ways

    T he Swago neighborhood was interlaced with wagon roads and with little footpaths that wound and sprangled across the hills. The Big Road that ran through the village, following the old Indian Trail, was not hard-surfaced until the late twenties. There were also smaller dirt roads: one down the river, one up Dry Crick, and the one across the river bridge. We were, essentially, a foot-walking society; and the paths intersected farm fields, ran up over pasture hills, along fence rows and the winding cricks. All paths and roads led eventually to the village, and there were the three centers of our life: Wint's store, the two-room schoolhouse, and the Lower Church just around the hill. The Upper Church stood at a crossroads up on Dry Crick.
    The store, which was also the post office, was where we got our mail, did our trading, picked up the news of the week, and visitedwith our neighbors and kin. There, the men sat around the stove, or on the store “platform,” talking, chewing, and spitting. On clean-up day, Wint would have to take a shovel to the dried tobacco spit, sort of scaling it off like he was digging up a hard-packed garden in the spring.
    The store building was a long cavernous structure, with only a little light filtering in from the high windows in the front and rear. In this narrow darkness, Wint kept a wild assortment of store goods in stock. There were showcases full of neckties, armbands, rolls of ribbon, button cards, rifle bullets, and shotgun shells. Horse harness, oil lanterns, steel traps, and gum boots hung from nails along the wall; and there were pepper boxes, vanilla bottles, cheese, fireworks, Arm and Hammer soda, yard goods, wooden buckets of salt fish, women's “fascinators,” Fig Newtons, and high-buttoned shoes. Wint also took in products from the neighborhood as trade goods: eggs, prints of butter, pokes of ginseng, maple sugar cakes, berries in season, and in the winter, the stretched and aired skins of foxes, raccoons, possums, and skunks.
    Various odors mingled in the smoky air, but the two that gave the pungent essence of the store were the brown Brazilian fragrance of coffee, and the stewing brownsmell of tobacco juice. To a mountain child, these odors gave promise of a five-cent tablet for school, a poke of striped peppermint candy, or even a box of Uneeda Biscuits or a can of sardines. We particularly envied our cousins, Wint's four children, who could come freely into the store, open a can of tomatoes,