Up From the Bottoms

Alva Bunt watched her husband go into the bottoms to cut the sweet gum and balsam, the big horses lifting their heavy legs in and out of the soft earth, rippling across their backs as flies rose and fell in a cloud above them. Marvin Bunt swore this was the last time he would haul out stumps. Tomorrow, he said, he would go into town and buy a stump remover. His one good leg itched near the scar from last year, he told his wife, and it was time for improvements on this two-bit southern Illinois farm.

She worried the goat out of her garden and trimmed the peonies hanging in their strings from last winter, then went to the barn where she felt under the hens for eggs, lifting them to the light to see the red life through the dream-thin skin. He will want eggs for dinner, she told the old dog behind the stove, and maybe a rabbit if I can skin it and dress it in time. She watched the sun hit the tops of the tallest thorn trees in Turley’s Woods and got out the skillet she had from her mother, and saw the cat sitting beside its blue bowl. “You can wait,” she said. The rest of the morning went by with hanging out sheets on the clothesline, and shoveling cinders from the coal stove.

When all was done, she went outside with a pitcher of lemonade to watch the wagon come up from the bottoms. They pulled the team under the lee of the barn where a man threw a blue tarp over something. The men walking beside the wagon stopped at the well to pump water on their heads before coming across the yard to the porch.