In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

28 the minnesota review Gary Garvin In the Welfare Office — She'd get the rent paid. That wasn't the problem. Those kind of things always took care of themselves. Irene McClellan leaned hard on her wrists against the edge of the sink, looking out the window, feeling as if at the threshold of something more promising and maybe more important than rent or husbands. Something that set off a pair of gnarled, hunched dogwoods against a line of tall pines several blocks away, something in the yellowish glow between and beyond the trees. The light rose and dissolved further away, just above the triple stacks of the old Carolina Mills' Revolution Plant, which, like pines themselves, strong and silent, trailed white smoke into a neutral sky. And yet some mornings— Behind her there was a panic of spoons and bowls as Larry II and Raymond attacked their breakfast. They weren't eating. The street was still dark. The back windows were lit in each of the identical frame houses before her, in which she made out the solemn gray figures of her neighbors sitting at the table, or moving slowly in and out of their kitchens. Like ghosts. White people. Her people. Out front on the lawns cars sat idling, filling the cold day with exhaust. Some mornings, she thought as she pulled her robed around her neck, I'd just like to sleep. She fingered the paint on the window sill, which broke off in brittle flakes and exposed the wood underneath. She'd hounded Larry for months to paint the kitchen, but he said that if anyone was going to do any painting , it'd be that bastard Sloan, because he didn't own the house, ABC Realty did. A-B-C Ree-al-tee, he made the words and letters rhyme— he did things like that. There was music in everything he did. He finally did paint the kitchen, but the paint started peeling off no sooner than it had dried. Not long after, he took off. And try to get support from that black bastard, who already had another mouth to feed, and a big fat one at that. Irene had seen the other woman only once, on the other side of town, stuffed in the cab of Larry's pickup. She didn't even know if he'd bothered to get married this time. But she'd be damned if she'd take him back to court. They'd only throw him in city jail for a weekend, and they weren't even doing that anymore, probably because she was getting that check from the county now. If you started fooling around with the law, there was no telling what would happen . That secretary of Sloan's said they'd send out the sheriff this time if she were late again with the rent. She had till five o'clock. garvín 29 Today. Didn't nothing stick. Nothing at all. You woke up each morning raw and dumb and it was like you woke up for the first time or like you never went to bed. It looked so cold outside, as if the weather never could do and never had done anything else. Irene wrapped her arms around her chest, preoccupied, thinking, but not thinking, not looking out anymore and letting the world turn into a soft blur. She found her gaze transfixed between the window panes and the screen where a few flies appeared, memories of summer, shriveled up and limned with frost, lying dead on the sill. Above, a spider was suspended by a thread with its thin legs clenched about the lifeless shell of its body— A crash hit her on the back of the head, then Larry's scream. She spun around to see a spoon and fragments of a bowl scud across the floor. "What in the hell has gotten into you two, anyway?" She must have shouted. Her sons looked up and froze. Raymond was caught halfway across the table grabbing at Larry who was beside himself in tears. Their faces shrank with sudden guilt as their eyes darted about the floor, and they sat and...

pdf

Share