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Features > > Grace by Sou Macmillan
Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 45
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 (06:00:00)
And as we listened, the last piece of grass in all of Ohio named itself in alien noises and in painful quiet, and in the shifting of things, and in bare cupboards. Going into town was necessary.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 44
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 (06:20:00)
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| Abe was about big as bullets when he came in the front door, flannel shirt flyin' and trailer cap on backwards. Yep, he sure were something else, trottin' up the front steps with a bounce in his workboots and his big frame comin' to catch Amy by surprise (even tho' she'd heard his rig off in the distance, a sound not like the train hollow whistle come-take-me-back-to-North-Carolina whistle hollow, she knew the sound of rubber wheels three miles off) an bus her offa her feet with some big kiss. And when he'd come in the front door it was never, Hi, Honey, I'm home, or any some such bullshit, she'da never settle for that, it was a Big Fat WHERE'S THE WOMAN I LOVE SO MUCH!!! and a shit-eatin' smile, he beamed when he'd come in offa the road. He always had something for the boys in the cab. He always sent postcards. He called every night. This was the last time he would be driving home like this. He came home to a house swept and full of boxes, and Amy in a flurry and smiling as she taped paper around the glassware. |
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 43
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 (06:00:00)
I walked the floors at night and you started to pack your things in boxes, you said, Just in case, and knew that, in spite of the little mysteries, I didn't want to leave. Joan would mumble, Jerusalem, and the hairs on the back of your neck would stand on end. Joan would say that she wanted to go home and you would suggest to her that maybe that wasn't such a bad idea, her going home. I think that if you could have made her vanish you would have waved your hand and forged her to disappear.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 42
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 (06:00:00)
One by one we each woke at the foot of the tree. Just before Lee woke up there, she called it mass hysteria. I told her that there weren't enough of us to call it mass hysteria. Lee put the tea cozy on her head and proclaimed the last two weeks National Tree Camping Holiday, but no one had a calendar to mark anything on, the most we knew was that it was almost autumn, so she reproclaimed Almost Autumn as Tree Camping Holiday. Her attempts at humor fell flat 'cos we were all starting to get nervous and our cheer was wearing thin.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 41
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 (06:00:00)
I started to walk the floors at night and you started to follow my pattern of walking, but always a few rooms behind. At first we would pretend that we had something that we were working on that would keep us up so late to see the sun rise 'cos we didn't want to worry each other. You would carry a book with you like you were trying to find a comfortable place to read it, complaining about drafty windows and lumpy furniture. I would say that I had some ideas on my mind, carry around my sketchbook and a pen stuck in my ponytail by where I had pulled out grey hairs you had found when we were lying in bed in the morning. Later we just walked through the house without pretension of something else keeping us awake. Sometimes you would put your finger to my lips and say, Shhhh... Listen? Do you hear feet? and we'd stand stock still listening to the little noises of the House, tuning our ears to listen for feet. We would stare out the windows of the House and look at the straw man. We would sit wide awake in our bed looking at each other like kids after a scary movie. We would lie in bed and look out the window, trying to make our eyes tired enough to sink into our bed. We would stare exhaustedly over our coffee cups in the kitchen as morning set in, coming just a little bit later every day. Staring at dawn became our preoccupation as the days started to cool off, just as you'd predicted. We never talked about what kept us up nights 'cos there was nothing say about a case of nightwalks.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 40
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, June 03, 2008 (06:00:00)
I started to walk the floors at night and you started to pack your summer clothes in boxes. YOu said that it would be cooling off soon, the quick rain meant that autumn was on the way and close. Joan started to insist more and more often that she heard a child crying at the top of the second floor and sometimes when she was in the kitchen. I listened while I walked through the House when I couldn't sleep, but I never heard anyone but us. I don't know what I was expecting to hear, maybe strangers on the way to somewhere over the tracks? I wasn't sure what it was that I wanted to hear.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 39
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 (06:30:00)
I told you that I thought your ghosts took me personally. Your ghosts, moving things around in the dark and making noises. Making me listen. You said that I had, completely lost touch with reality, because I said ghosts didn't exist. Hmmmm... Right after we met you'd asked me if I believed that ghosts existed and I told you that no, I didn't believe they did. You didn't seem to mind then.
So if it wasn't ghosts, then who the hell put the scarecrow back up? Your eyes were wild and wide and around the same color as the sky. Who?
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 38
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 (06:00:00)
In the kitchen window:
Atlantis drowning upside down in the dusk, hollow train waiting, we listening for anything. The grass, spiteful dreamer, unflattening, reaching higher in resistance to the sun sinking, stretching ragged arms upward with the wind of a butterfly's wings -
blind and vulnerable companions to the new corn, aspiring.
The grass named itself, every blade, as we listened.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 37
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 (06:00:00)
You said, How can you tell if you've got ghosts? as if ghosts were an infestation of some sort - like termites or something, and if you didn't call someone over to clean it up, before you knew it the foundation would be sinking. Ghosts, huh? I said back, Why do you ask?
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 36
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, May 06, 2008 (06:00:00)
Joan started to relax after the first few weeks had passed and she had something which to pay most of her attention, the rabbit we all called Rabbit since Joan turned out not to be all that imaginative and couldn't think of a suitable name for an animal so tame that it seemed like a cautious kid, and we watched as she learned how to hold it so that it wouldn't scratch her up. The girl that had said that she had no sense for animals was proven to be speaking mush, as Rabbit became the largest rabbit I had ever seen in a matter of three weeks. Lee raised an eyebrow and wondered out loud if there wasn't nuclear waste in the water. The rest of us looked ok, tho', so we didn't worry over it that much. But Rabbit was big for sure, a female with an outstanding hunk of fluff on her chest and feet the size of my palm and fingers. Bubba spent as much time as he could terrorizing Rabbit, and Clifford chased Bubba and the House was a noisebox all over again before we even knew it.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 35
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 (06:00:00)
Lee came Home in the last week of August and the heat beginning to break and just starting to gust into out bedrooms. Window fans were still up against the screens and the front door was slamming itself shut enough that we had braced it open with an old pair of shoes to let the cooler air in. We heard her coming from a mile off, a whisper of a crunch on the gravel, and then the rumbling of the Dart's old engine, deep with the sound of hauling a full trunk and furniture tied to the top, the moan of air between the legs of a coffee table upside-down for all the world to look at. See, everything was flat now and distance could be crossed with the eyes. You could see further than before now that the corn was flat. You could see a good ten miles of flat out from the middle of the new shoots. We watched as Lee pulled up to the House, loud and in front of everybody with a shit-eating grin and swaggering as she got out of the driver's side, followed by Bubba, stretching off the drive. Right behind Bubba was a tall woman with stick-colored hair and an unsteady smile, kinda shy and all fulla curious, looking around her.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 34
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 (06:00:00)
This waking to something indefinite is a bother slipped through closed eyed that own greasier fingers - the sound of a house that has drowned, the spit and spark of wiring failing, the rasp of newly laid gravel merging with mud, the noise of timbers looking for purchase, having been jettisoned from the foundation only recently... The sounds of a flood as the Ground and the Home, fixing themselves, slowly, came back to being as one.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 33
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 (06:00:00)
A funny thing, going back to where you came from - it's where all the Before is kept, and it's a toss-up as to whether you can stay there. Someone said once that you can't go back to where you came from, but how do you justify the attraction to return? Lee said she'd needed a vacation of sorts, and she'd started to feel a bit of nostalgia and she wanted to wipe that outta her head with a quick trip back. We'd all been telling stories for the last few weeks about where we were from, a comparative study, if you may. Yeh! That's what it was like for me too! and Didja ever..?And now that it was just the three of us, the conversations got scattered, easily distracted. Maybe she wanted to go home for a few weeks to see if it was still actually there. Not that you or I believed that there was anyplace else than Here in our finer moments. But then there were weeks like this, with everything soggy and damp, and us wondering where we were in relation to the rest of Ohio, 'cos you thought you could smell paper in the air, the smell sharp and pungent, and damper than here, carried in the wind. Lee left with the Dart's tapedeck singing at the top of mechanical lungs.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 32
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, April 08, 2008 (06:00:00)
Lee went back to her hometown for a few weeks in the beginning of a strangely cool August, to get things clean and to fix the destruction. Bubba had finally come out from under the bed and had started to check things out, pick through the bloodied chicken feathers and staying close to the House. Lee packed him up in her old Dodge Dart and packed a spare can of gas to get her to a pump, and headed out. She said she couldn't bear to leave without him, and he didn't seem too opposed to the idea, hanging between her forearm and her chest, with his legs sticking out and his toes splayed, but looking relaxed for a change. Lee said she needed a vacation of sorts, and she'd started to feel a bit of nostalgia and wanted to wipe that outta her head with a quick trip back.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 31
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, April 01, 2008 (06:00:00)
The front yard.
The perpetuation of the mud that is Ohio - a broad hill of brown rising out of noplace out of the ground with no particular urgency. The house perched tentatively on top in all of its simplicity, brown stained white with mud-olive trip, Sears and Roebuck basic green a memory, vaguely picturesque, simple, plain old, tilting on its foundation, look around and it's a lot of
waiting,
utterly unfascinating.
We came back out to the front porch after the rain began to slack and then finally stopped, in its chittering and dripping at the end of the white noise symphony, and look at the nothing. Full moon made it look nice, a little less like destruction.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 30
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 (06:00:00)
The rain dutifully fell in torrents of blinding white, as if the landscape were melting and the bouncing off the mud, which was all that was left, it seemed.
The rain took away the grass, flattened down the corn, pulled a piece of the porch into the gravel, and then washed most of that into what was left of the corn.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 29
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 (06:05:00)
The precise moment of the corn twisting, I can pinpoint: it was punctuated with the howls of a small voice becoming still.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 28
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 (06:00:00)
Ok - try to remember this:
Remember as if it's almost the end of summer again
with a sky the color of bottle glass
and green beginning to brown on the lawn, perfect cooling summer
when a revolution you've never heard about
begins -
the Chinese butterfly flapped its wings
and a tsunami lands in your one-pump town, and the farmers look to their tools for weapons. What do you do?
In your no-sides sneakers, with your apolitical pocket lint, wondering
at the speaker with the pitchfork flattering the sun with his all-rust attitude...
Can you remember it?
Like it was yesterday.
The silence was deafening.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 27
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 (07:00:00)
When the lightning knocked the scarecrow down and caught him on fire, I got to missing something when I looked at the field in the broad daylight. I would hunt around for his hat before I would remember all of a sudden that he had been knocked down by the rain. And I would get that sick feeling all over again, like something was happening, something Bigger than the rest of us, here on Earth, in the little piece of grass, hoping on the wind for...
...something.
The silence was deafening.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 26
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 (07:00:00)
The sound was dissonant, the sound of a parent crying to a child for help, the sound of a building breaking where the roof has gone rotten. It was the dissonant music, the honey of a familiar voice and the break of the beams in the building you're standing in. The din of an angry crowd.
And the scarecrow fell with its arms out flailing and the sound of the strings too loose struck, heating, and flying from the first chair fiddle. Inspired, but failing.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 25
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 (07:00:00)
Kentucky is not that far from where we were and it rises out of the ground like someone shoved their fist up underneath the dirt and wished real hard. Where we were is nothing like that. Nobody ever wished on southern Ohio, it just happened. Hell, mighta happened by accident, the way it looks. Sure, people would wish for something outta the ground, but did they ever wish on the ground?
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 24
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, February 12, 2008 (07:00:00)
Allison was hanging out by the apple tree when she had the epiphany.
I was sitting out on the porch, doing what it was that I did, and scratching in charcoal on brown paper, watching her hang the laundry, sing Amazing Grace, and hang the laundry some more. I saw the big black bird land on the line by her, and then I heard her scream a couple seconds later and looked up just in time to see her sink to her knees and start to pray. And I thought, What the hell's that all about? and ran over to check and make sure she was ok, and the rest of the house came out to see what the screaming was all about and why Allison was standing on her knees in the muddy grass by the apple tree, praying and crying.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 23
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, February 05, 2008 (07:00:00)
Frankie liked to be out of the house about as much as I did. I would see her out by the chicken coops or by the apple tree with her little camera, taking her pictures or writing notes on her little flip pad, picking up grass and pieces of things she'd find. Clifford took to her and followed her all around, but never out of range of where he could see me. If she'd go out into the corn too far, he;d follow her out a row or two and then come back up to the edge and bark for her to come back, wagging his tail and raising Cain until either she came back or he got tired or waiting and decided it was about time for him to settle into a nap at the edge of the corn. Funny dog. Took to certain people, well he really took to just about everyone, but there were people in particular that he really liked to hang out with, and those people he didn't like to let out of his sight. He knew who liked to play catch with him, dragged that sloppy old tennis ball all around and followed you once he knew you liked to play catch with him. Once the game of catch got old he;d just follow you around, looking for you to run with him, maybe play tag.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 22
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 (07:00:00)
The porch, some nights when it was just me and the cool air and everybody inside doing what it was that we all did, was almost quiet.
Sometimes thing sneak up on you nice and gently, and you don't notice them really until you're in the thick of it and all your stuff's a little haywire. Bills do that. Gardens do that. Art does that. Guests do that.
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Grace in the Shadow of the Big Tree - Chapter 21
Posted by Sou on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 (07:00:00)
Forever on the edge of standing still
vindictive is the weather - waiting as we do
with one foot raised
as if stationary, then she moves so fast...
And I was watching the rain come across the field, see where the corn bends here, watching where the sky darkened
so fast
there
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