Read Online Music Makers by Kate Wilhelm - Free Book Online

understand that she no longer has the choices she might once have had. She is as stuck as I am.
    The crazy train whistle, I remind myself, and try to remember the circumstances the next time. Before Christmas, and bitterly cold, with snow on the ground and frost-decorated windows. I had to go shopping that day, and was waiting for Mom to add items to my list. Since her heart attack a few years ago, she can’t tolerate extremely cold weather and has given up leaving the house until spring.
    “Get some dormant oil spray for the trees,” Dad ordered.
    “Dad, for heaven’s sake, let Mr. Garry do them the way he’s always done.”
    Mr. Garry has tractors, motorized everything, farm hands to do the chores, and he had included Dad’s one and a half acres along with his own forty or fifty-acre orchard. I thought it was simple generosity for a long time, then came to realize he was also protecting his trees by keeping disease and insect pests out of Dad’s adjoining grove.
    “He puts a foot on my ground, I’ll shoot him,” Dad said. “You hear me, you let him in her, he’s dead.” He began to curse and yell and Mom gave me a warning look.
    “I added it to the list,” Mom said, almost inaudibly. It would have made little difference if she had screamed the words; his voice filled the house.
    I took the list from my mother, glanced at it, and waited for her to count out money. It might be enough, or not.
    “And bring me the receipts,” Dad yelled. “All the change and the receipts. You hear me? I want to see it all! And it better be right. Stupid, you think I don’t notice five dollars missing, or three, but I do, and I want the change, all of it.”
    I suppose that was what did it that day. I had been making up the slight difference with my own money week after week, watching my savings account erode with the inevitability of a glacier flowing into the sea.
    “I haven’t been stealing your money!” I yelled back at him. “And what’s more I don’t intend to get a spray for those damn trees! If Mr. Garry doesn’t do them, they won’t get done. I’m not going to try to spray an acre and a half of trees with a five gallon sprayer in this weather, or in any weather! Sell the damn trees to Garry and be done with them.”
    I turned and walked from the room, shaking. I never had talked back to him before.
    “You listen to me, stupid! Don’t you turn your back on me when I’m speaking to you! Come back here! Or get your ass out of my house and stay out! Stupid! Thief! Lying stupid thief!”
    He was screaming obscenities when I left the house. Briefly I worried about my mother having to listen, but not for long. She had put up with him all my life, and I had no doubt for all her married life. I could still remember nightmarish road trips and my terror that he would hit someone, kill us all, or have a stroke in his fury, and her silence. Now I wished he would get angry enough to bring on another stroke, this time a fatal one.
    That is the clue, I think at the table, the whistle came after an especially ugly day or two. Something has to break this impasse. I have to find a way to talk them into selling the property and moving to an assisted-living retirement community. With his meager pension, Social Security, and the proceeds of a sale, they could do it, just barely. But it would be better than living out here miles from the nearest village, with one in a wheelchair and the other too weak to push the chair or help him in or out of it.
    Her heart attack happened a few months after he retired, not a voluntary retirement, I suspect, and during those months she dropped a circle of friends. When I asked why she never saw any of them any longer, she said, “Oh, well, you know, when you get older your interests change.” He drove them off, the way he drove off Mr. Garry. In a community of retirees, she could make some friends again, have a few activities of her own.
    “But he’s always had an orchard,” she said in