Read Online Fields of Home by Ralph Moody - Free Book Online Page B

stairs. I heard a board or two squeak in the chamber where I’d been sleeping and, in a couple of minutes, he came back with a half-empty quart bottle in his hand. There was a broken green sticker over the cork, and a picture of a crow on the label.
    Grandfather watched, but he didn’t say anything while Millie measured a teaspoon of the whiskey into the glass, put in a heaping spoonful of sugar, and filled the glass with hot water. It smelled good when she set it beside Grandfather’s plate. He wrinkled up his nose a little, and grumbled, “Don’t need the tarnal stuff! Ain’t sick!” But he picked the glass up, and lifted his eyebrows high as he slooped a little sip from the glass.
    Millie hadn’t given the bottle back to Uncle Levi, but he walked around the table and picked it up. Before he put the cork back in, he turned the bottle up and took a big, long swallow. A couple of dozen little air bubbles went dancing up through the red liquor. He didn’t raise his eyebrows the way Grandfather had, but when he took the bottle down he shut his eyes tight and shook his head like a horse with a fly in its ear. Then he took the bottle back upstairs.
    While he was gone, Grandfather kept telling me what wicked stuff whiskey was, that the Almighty never planned it for anything but medicine, and where people went who drank it just for fun the way Uncle Levi did. But he kept sipping, too, and smacked his lips after every sip. When it was all gone, he cut himself a piece of steak bigger than the one I had, and he ate it all.
    I did the milking and fed the calf while Millie was washing the supper dishes. When I came back into the house Grandfather was dozing at the kitchen table, Old Bess was sitting with her head in his lap, and Uncle Levi was asleep in the high backed rocking chair. He had his feet up on the hot-water tank at the back of the stove, and the magazine he’d been reading had fallen on his chest. Millie strained the milk and put it away while I was blowing out the lantern and washing my hands. Then she scrubbed her hands until I thought she’d peel the skin off them. She didn’t say a word to me until she’d gone to her room, brought out a long flat bolt of checkered gingham, and stood, with the pantry windowpane for a mirror, shaping the end of the cloth over her shoulders and around her neck. “Pretty, ain’t it?” she asked at last in a low whisper. “Levi don’t never come down, he don’t fetch me something pretty.”
    “Does he come very often?” I whispered back.
    “No telling when he’ll come or when he’ll go. Comes when Thomas is down sick—or when he makes him think so. Goes when they get to squabbling so devilish hard they can’t abide one another no longer. Sometimes Levi has to go off back to Boston when he’s got a job of work to do. Brick mason. Devilish good one I hear tell. Only man roundabouts can put the linings in glass furnaces.”
    As she whispered, she wound the checkered gingham back on the flat spool, folded the paper around it, tucked it under her arm, and held both hands out toward me. “Let’s see them hands,” she said. She took both my hands in hers and turned the palms up toward the lamp. “Devilish sore, ain’t they?” she asked. “Why didn’t you let on sooner?”
    “I didn’t let on at all,” I told her. “Uncle Levi just happened to notice them when we shook hands.”
    “Levi notices lots of things a body wouldn’t count on.”
    “They’re all right,” I said. “They’ll toughen up when I soak them in salt water.”
    “And saleratus. Helps to keep the salt from burning so devilish bad. Sit down at the table while I fix you some.”
    Grandfather woke up when I sat down at the table. It was a warm night and, though the wood had burned out, the stove had quite a little heat left in it. I’d have wanted to sit near an open window, but Grandfather opened the oven door, drew the other rocking chair up close, and put both feet into the oven. Then, as