Roseborough: A Novel

Chapter 6

101 Chapter Six 1 Waking up from his nap Mr. Roseborough rolls over and looks out the window. The sun is just about down. Before long the cows will be coming up to feed. They will eat slow and then they will drink long slow drinks of water. Afterward they’ll stand around, shifting their weight and lowing. Mr. Roseborough thinks their eyes are right pretty, like coffee in sunshine. Some days they have to wait a long time for him to get up strength enough to feed them. Thinking that now, he rolls back over, lets his legs drop over the side of the bed, and sits up. He has to sit quite a spell before the room stops spinning. Then he makes his way through the kitchen and, holding on to the screen door, steps off the back step and walks out into the yard toward the barn. Here it is hard going, getting up to the loft where he keeps the feed. He dreads it. He takes hold of the ladder and, “Well, here goes!” he says to himself. He puts one foot on the bottom rung that is a good ways off the ground, and gives a push, trying to get the other one up beside it. “Dad burn it!” he cries, when his foot doesn’t make it. He pushes again, but before his foot comes up, he is flat on the ground, and here comes this girl, thin as a 102 Jane Roberts Wood stick, flying over to where he is lying on the ground beside the ladder. “Who in thunder are you?” he asks. Then he remembers. “This here property’s posted. You’re trespassin’.” Seeing that the girl just stands there, looking down at him, “Who are you?” he asks again. “I’m Echo,” she says, sitting back on her heels. “I was just passing by.” “Hurumpt,” he says, to let her know he doesn’t believe that last. “Well now, girl,” he says, shoving himself to a sitting position , wiping his eyes that are watering some from the fall, “since you’re here, you might as well give me a hand.” She holds her hand out to help him up. “No, no,” he says, brushing it away. “I can git myself up. I just want you to stop the cows from their dadburned bawling. Climb up there and throw down some dadburned hay.” Before he gets the last word out she is up the ladder pulling open a bale of hay and throwing some down, while he calls up to her, “Not too much! That’s about right. There. Now that pan on the nail just over that sack. Fill it about half full. No! Don’t throw it down. Come down here to feed the chickens.” Then the girl, he can’t think of her name (she has a funny one), is feeding the chickens. “Here chick, chick, chick. Here chick,” she chants, making her way among them, carefully tossing handfuls of grain, first on one side and then the other, making sure that all are fed. Watching her, all at once, it seems like it might be Stella, the way she was years ago. How many? He’s lost track. But later that night he knows it was that, seeing Stella so plain, that made him say yes when the girl, Echo, asked if she could sleep on his front porch. And dern if she hadn’t, all wrapped up in Stella’s quilts that he had pulled out of the old trunk in the closet. 103 Roseborough The very next day she throws all the hay down from the loft, the chicken feed, too, and drags it into the garage so he can feed the cows and chickens his own self. Since then she’s been his right-hand man. But he can still do things for himself. “Now, girl, you don’t have to be over here so much,” he tells her. “You better go on home. Your mama’s likely worried.” And she leaves without a word, but when she leaves, the fear comes flying back to roost, like some old crow, on his back. Then dragging himself out of bed he catches himself talking to an empty house again. “Folks get old, they take ’em off. Put ’em in a home somewhere,” he mutters, and trying to buckle his belt, find the eyelet. “I’d rather be dead than off in one of them homes...