The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes Read Free Book Online Page B

least,” said Ree, “gives the vines and poison-ivy something to grow on” (all those long, sticky, tendrilly things that Augustine so much disliked; and the burrs big as rats). He also sold gasoline—canned, for he hadn’t a pump—which “helped no end with his fires.” Also this smith, Ree alleged, had a terrible crush on someone called Sadie who wouldn’t look at him “spita she’s kinda his niece....”
    No, perhaps the smithy and smith were both of them better left out. So he took a fresh sheet, and started instead to draw for Polly a mother skunk with her little ones—queer little black-and-white creatures all feathery tail and no head, as he’d watched them once with bated breath on his porch. As he did so, he wondered what sweet-hope-in-hell he’d got that he’d ever see Mary and Polly again—quite apart from the new one....
    If only he’d had the sense to give himself up straight off when he landed, and tried to explain! For Augustine well knew what a fool he had been: it was no use pretending he hadn’t, and any day soon he was likely to pay for it dearly. But yet ... Even now, as he feathered the tails of his skunks with elaborate flourishes—plumed them indeed like Victorian hearses, so black seemed his future—something from under his mind was struggling up towards daylight but couldn’t quite make it, like bubbles in mud. For the fact was that though he hadn’t one bit enjoyed being shot at, now it had happened he wouldn’t have had it unhappen again for all the gold in the world. That unbridgeable chasm at Oxford between the men who had fought in the War and the boys too young for it.... Now he too had been shot at and might have been killed; and for-crying-out-loud, what a load of guilt that took off one’s shoulders—even admitting one’s “War” had lasted for only six seconds (or seven at most)!
    When at last Augustine looked up from his drawing he saw that excited face at his window.... He dropped his pen, and jumped to his feet with a sense of relief so intense it took even himself by surprise that a grown-up man (one who had fought and been shot at and might have been killed!) should have come to depend on a child to quite the extent he had come to depend on this Ree. For he had to admit it: time spent in her company sang with a whole new octave of notes.
    Yet who was this Ree? It had puzzled Augustine the way she had never once mentioned her parents, or said where she lived—let alone shown signs of wanting to carry him home and exhibit her prize, as most children would. Was she native? Or was she a summer migrant, one of that youthful holiday crowd from the country outside, which sometimes invaded the store like a flock of starlings then vanished again in a flock—like starlings?
    As well as its woods the “township” included some four or five miles of small stony hills with scrub on their tops, and stone-walled fields lower down where grass fought a losing battle with sumac and rocks. Here there were small scattered farms built of timber and weather-board: long left unpainted and grindingly poor, there was hardly a building apart from the house—just an outside privy, a rusty old pump in the yard, the fag-end of last winter’s woodpile and mostly not even an ice-house. The old Yankee stock which had built them and farmed them had long been dwindling: for generations, Yankees go-getting enough had all gone West leaving only the rather more feckless and pleasanter characters—men not over-given to work, so that one little struggling farmstead after another had given up struggling. Empty, some of these tumble- down houses had tumbled right down or caught fire; but others had lately begun to be bought up cheap on mortgage as family holiday-places by painters and writers not quite arrived enough yet to make Provincetown, followed by other adventurous small-income