Read Online Eli the Good by Silas House - Free Book Online

never felt as free in her entire life as she did that day. Sitting in Nell’s mother’s big red Buick, one arm propped in the open window as she watched the town slip away and the countryside open up on either side of them, like a green, busy hymnal spread out, its spine the road. High summer. “There were tiger lilies all down the side of the road,” she’d remember, and I imagined great orange-red waves that bobbed and swayed in the wind of the passing car. Nell’s house was out on the river and my mother had never been allowed out there before. Everyone she knew believed that if people didn’t live in town, they weren’t worth knowing. She did not agree.
    They raced down the winding road, bouncing across the rickety bridge, plowing through the rising dust of the dirt road that led to Nell’s house. She sped around this curve and that one until she came to a jaunting stop near a small white house.
    “This is it,” Nell said and when the dust fell away, settling on the big leaves of the big trees all around the yard like sifted flour, my mother stepped out of the car.
    And that’s when she first saw my father. He was bent into the engine of his truck, with no shirt and grease smeared up his arms. He wiped his hands on his pants and shook her hand, smiling. “I knew, right then,” Mom said when she looked back on that day.
    Meeting Nell and Daddy’s own mother, Yvonne, was almost as good. Yvonne was a tall, long-fingered woman who was always in motion. Her husband had been killed in World War II, and she had found no need for another man in her life. “I got by just fine without him,” she liked to say. She died before I was old enough to remember her, but was always a legend in our family.
    After supper, my mother insisted on helping with the dishes. Afterward, they all sat on the porch drinking sweet tea, and Nell and Yvonne sang hymns to the gathering dusk. Yvonne kept an orange-and-black Gibson guitar propped up on the porch glider, which she snatched up before every song to strum out the key they would sing in, a capella. They closed their eyes as if no one else was there and harmonized what Yvonne called “gloaming songs,” which is where my mother first heard her favorite word. They sang:
    “Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh;
    Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.
    Now the darkness gathers, stars begin to peep;
    Birds and beasts and flowers soon will be asleep.”
    While they sang, my mother thought she might have stumbled upon some enchanted place where people sang when they wanted to, and laughed while they were together, and actually enjoyed one another. She had never witnessed such a thing in her whole life. “And Lord, their voices,” Mom said every time she recalled that evening. “It was almost too much to bear, it was all so good.” By the time they started singing “Softly and Tenderly” to the graying world, she couldn’t help it: she started singing with them. For the first time in her life, she didn’t care if she was a good enough singer or not. She just wanted to sing, and when she did, Yvonne and Nell both smiled and nodded to her, egging her on until she sang with complete abandon.
    When the song was over, Yvonne told my mother she was welcome to their home anytime. “We’ve eaten together, and we’ve sung together,” she said, “so we’re family now.”
    Then Yvonne grabbed the Gibson and sang “You Are My Flower” with her eyes closed, her left hand sliding up and down the fingerboard like an expert guitarist.
    Later that night, my mother thought of what Yvonne had said about them being family. She lay in the twin bed across from Nell’s, unable to sleep because of her joy.
    After only a few visits, she found herself sitting on the back porch with my father, alone. “We talked about
everything,
” she’d say.
    He was already crazy over her by the time she told him that she was three months’ pregnant. So there was no turning back. “He said it