The Cove by Ron Rash Read Free Book Online

blackberries. As a child, the outcrop had been like a huge hand that lifted her out of the cove’s bleakness. Worst of all was the cabin. No matter the time of day or season or how many lamps were lit, it remained a dim place that, as long as Laurel could remember, always smelled of suffering. But up here the wide shelf of granite gathered the sun’s light and held it, swaddled Laurel in brightness. The light was like warm honey. Dewdrops on a spider’s web held whole rainbows inside them and a fence lizard’s tail shone blue as indigo glass. The water sparkled with mica. Sometimes Laurel laid flat on the outcrop so the sun could fall fuller on her, but most of the time, like now, she’d just fold her knees close to her chest with her hands, as if waiting for something or someone to arrive. Waiting. She had been waiting, waiting in the cabin as well as here for her life to begin, her life.
    A leaky heart. That was what Doctor Carter called it. Laurel had memories of her father baling hay and plowing, of him and Slidell felling a big white oak with a crosscut saw. But that was before the evening her father hadn’t come in for supper and Laurel’s mother found him near dead in the field. After that, Doctor Carter came once a month and took his stethoscope from the black leather bag, pressed its silver bell against her father’s bony chest. Those had been the moments that frightened Laurel most, because there was always a pause when he moved the bell one place and then another, as if unable to locate her father’s heartbeat.
    Everyone had to do more as he failed away. While their mother fixed breakfast, Hank fed and milked the cow and Laurel fetched eggs and water. Afternoons the two of them plowed fields and rooked hay and mucked the barn and all of whatever else to keep the farm going. Sometimes her father came on the porch and watched, once hobbled out to hitch a plow to the draft horse. After a few minutes, her mother hoisted him back to the cabin, all the while him gasping for breath and sobbing that he was nothing but a burden, that the world couldn’t be made a more sorrowful place. But when Laurel was twelve, she and Hank and her father found the lie of that.
    Her mother had been chopping firewood and caught a splinter off a piece of kindling. She’d dug the splinter out with a pocketknife, which should have been the cure of it, but the wound swelled with pus. Her mother cut again, deeper, then poured turpentine in it before wrapping the thumb in cheesecloth. The next morning red streaks ran all the way up to her elbow. Hank went to Mars Hill for Doctor Carter, who came that afternoon and lanced the palm. It had been an awful thing to watch as the blade made its cleave through the flesh. Doctor Carter had soaked the hand in Epsom salts, then wrapped it in cotton gauze. You folks don’t die easy, he reassured Laurel and Hank. I’d not have given your daddy six months the first time I heard that heart of his halting and hissing, so I’m of a mind your momma will pull through. But she hadn’t. Laurel’s father cried that life wasn’t supposed to be this hard, that a man sickly as he was shouldn’t have a wife die on him.
    Laurel had resented those words. He’d had a hard life but her father wasn’t alone in that. She became the one who cooked her father’s meals and dumped his chamber pot and changed his soiled bedsheets. She’d washed him and salved his bedsores. There had been plenty of misery put on Hank’s shoulders too. Slidell had helped some but Hank did most of the farmwork, at nine doing a full man’s portion. Their parents had managed to hold on to part of the money from selling the Tennessee farm, money they parceled out to buy what they couldn’t grow or make themselves.
    Yet she and Hank had made it through, in part because they could count on each other. But it was more than just that, Laurel had always believed.