Read Online All You Get Is Me by Yvonne Prinz - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Yvonne Prinz
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my dad and Steve got me to the hospital. I looked like the star of a slasher movie. I also threw up in the hospital parking lot. Not pretty.
There are three stalls in the barn from back when they kept horses. With a shovel and a wheelbarrow I cleared out all the straw and the thousand-year-old poop. I came across a bat and her tiny baby bats, sleeping upside down with their leathery wings wrapped around them like Dracula’s cape. Under the straw in one of the stalls, I found a bunch of loose boards, which I pried up, hoping for a hidden treasure: a chest of gold coins or bullion or bonds or anything to help get me out of this mess. Instead I found a black metal box and a rat trap with a dried-up rat in it. The box was filled with old photos: several sepia-toned wedding photos of a handsome, young, large-eared groom and his delicate-looking bride. They appear shy and hopeful. There was another photo of the groom but in this one he’s in an army uniform. He looks proud and scared at the same time. There was also one of a baby in a christening gown, a beautiful little girl with rosebud lips. The last photo in the stack was our farmhouse, newly painted with window boxes and a porch swing. A little girl in a smocked dress and white patent leather shoes is sitting on the porch steps. The oak tree barely touches the top of the eaves and there’s a rooster weather vane on the spine of the roof. I figured that this must be the first young family to own this place and I wondered what happened to them. I wondered if they were able to make a go of things here or if the husband even made it back from the war. In the box I also found a Saint Christopher medallion on a chain and an army medal, a bronze cross with an outstretched hawk or an eagle in the middle. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would leave these mementos behind. How could a person forget about them? I took the box into the house and put it in my dresser drawer.
My dad and I made a lot of trips into town for food and supplies. While my dad went over to the bank or the post office, I would go to the grocery store. People in town all seemed to know who I was: “the daughter of that fella who took over the Soameses’ place.” I guess the fact that we were driving his old truck gave us away. They all wanted to know what we had planned for the place and they wished us lots of luck. The grocer always threw something extra in my bag for me like a licorice whip or some bubble gum, like I was seven years old.
The other thing about farm life that they don’t tell you is that the work is never done. A person could go insane, running around fixing things and doing chores only to start all over again every morning. But after we got through a lot of my dad’s list, things didn’t seem quite so urgent. We were selling the produce, money was starting to trickle in, and most of the farm was in decent shape. Don’t get me wrong, if you wandered onto our property, the first thought that would come to you would be wow, what a dump , but to us it was a vast improvement.
I finally got to take a little time for myself and I walked out to the back pasture, which isn’t a pasture anymore because Farmer Bob never had any grazing animals and neither do we. Rufus was taking one of his famous naps on the rag rug under the kitchen table so I grabbed my camera and ventured out alone. The grasses were thigh high and I had to push them aside as I made my way toward a stand of trees in the middle of the pasture that I’d always been curious about. Why would a farmer clear a big field of trees and leave a stand of them like that? My first thought, of course, was that it was for sacrificing virgins at midnight. I could have sworn I’d heard moaning coming from that direction when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
When I finally came upon the stand it was much larger than I’d imagined it, a mini forest surrounded by an entire field of grasses. The trees were old and
There are three stalls in the barn from back when they kept horses. With a shovel and a wheelbarrow I cleared out all the straw and the thousand-year-old poop. I came across a bat and her tiny baby bats, sleeping upside down with their leathery wings wrapped around them like Dracula’s cape. Under the straw in one of the stalls, I found a bunch of loose boards, which I pried up, hoping for a hidden treasure: a chest of gold coins or bullion or bonds or anything to help get me out of this mess. Instead I found a black metal box and a rat trap with a dried-up rat in it. The box was filled with old photos: several sepia-toned wedding photos of a handsome, young, large-eared groom and his delicate-looking bride. They appear shy and hopeful. There was another photo of the groom but in this one he’s in an army uniform. He looks proud and scared at the same time. There was also one of a baby in a christening gown, a beautiful little girl with rosebud lips. The last photo in the stack was our farmhouse, newly painted with window boxes and a porch swing. A little girl in a smocked dress and white patent leather shoes is sitting on the porch steps. The oak tree barely touches the top of the eaves and there’s a rooster weather vane on the spine of the roof. I figured that this must be the first young family to own this place and I wondered what happened to them. I wondered if they were able to make a go of things here or if the husband even made it back from the war. In the box I also found a Saint Christopher medallion on a chain and an army medal, a bronze cross with an outstretched hawk or an eagle in the middle. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would leave these mementos behind. How could a person forget about them? I took the box into the house and put it in my dresser drawer.
My dad and I made a lot of trips into town for food and supplies. While my dad went over to the bank or the post office, I would go to the grocery store. People in town all seemed to know who I was: “the daughter of that fella who took over the Soameses’ place.” I guess the fact that we were driving his old truck gave us away. They all wanted to know what we had planned for the place and they wished us lots of luck. The grocer always threw something extra in my bag for me like a licorice whip or some bubble gum, like I was seven years old.
The other thing about farm life that they don’t tell you is that the work is never done. A person could go insane, running around fixing things and doing chores only to start all over again every morning. But after we got through a lot of my dad’s list, things didn’t seem quite so urgent. We were selling the produce, money was starting to trickle in, and most of the farm was in decent shape. Don’t get me wrong, if you wandered onto our property, the first thought that would come to you would be wow, what a dump , but to us it was a vast improvement.
I finally got to take a little time for myself and I walked out to the back pasture, which isn’t a pasture anymore because Farmer Bob never had any grazing animals and neither do we. Rufus was taking one of his famous naps on the rag rug under the kitchen table so I grabbed my camera and ventured out alone. The grasses were thigh high and I had to push them aside as I made my way toward a stand of trees in the middle of the pasture that I’d always been curious about. Why would a farmer clear a big field of trees and leave a stand of them like that? My first thought, of course, was that it was for sacrificing virgins at midnight. I could have sworn I’d heard moaning coming from that direction when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
When I finally came upon the stand it was much larger than I’d imagined it, a mini forest surrounded by an entire field of grasses. The trees were old and
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