Read Online Listen Here by Sandra L. Ballard - Free Book Online

need that made her drive him so. He went like a horse undriven, like a horse of God with wings and a dragon for his heart. He did not pause when the road curved and swooped down a hill, black in the shadow with white rocks glimmering and sparks from his iron shoes rising and dying like hasty fireflies. She laughed as they went sliding down into deeper darkness, and knew that she could go there and home again in time. The woman would not die, and she would have this ride, wild and heedless and free as she had always wanted.
    She laughed to think she was a woman now with heedless ways and causeless, senseless laughter gone behind her. In the last spring, early when the first wild iris came and she was sixteen, she had married Rufe, and her mother had said, “He'll keep you straight,” and her father had said, “It's better that you marry now and never give the neighbors cause to talk,” and Rufe had said, “You'll never go hungry.”
    Rebel was by the creek now, and did not pause to sniff the water, but plunged right in and where his feet struck, the water rose in a flowering spray that stood for a moment clear of the shadow until it seemed that when it fell silver had touched her hair. The creek was deep but clear and the gray horse swam and she trailed her fingers by his side and watched the fan-shaped ripples grow and fade. They crossed the creek and Rebel arched his neck and tossed his head and neighed and snorted with a great trumpeting and flung the water from his sides, and leaped away up the hill and under the beech trees and past the place where the sweet william grew. Their odor rose and mingled with the wind and she thought that some time she might return this way and walk all day on the hill and see the flowers and maybe pick a few to carry home; no, not home; Rufe did not like flowers. Better that a woman spend her time in the garden than with the foolishness of flowers.
    They came to a level rutted road with a zigzag rail fence on one side and a rolling pasture field beyond. She saw the field open and wide and inviting with the high grass bowing and whispering in the wind. It would be the shorter way, and she wanted to ride across the field and see Rebel race against his black shadow as it flew over the grass. She drew on the bridle rein and the great horse swerved and she felt his body rise in a flying lunge, and for an instant the rail fence in its mat of persimmon bush and red thorn lay below her, and then they were over and Rebel's front feet were striking the ground and he had fallen to his knees, but he was up again and away, and she was laughing and never looking back, her body one with the horse's body that skimmed over the field lightly as foam on swirling creek water.
    She dropped the rein across the saddle and gave the horse his head and looked up at the moon that seemed to ride across the cloud-flecked sky in the same glory of reckless joy with which she rode the field. She remembered the woman sick and like to die, and sorrow for the woman sharpened her own joy in the world. Tonight she thought that she loved the moon and the wind-torn feathers of cloud more than yesterday or any of the days before yesterday; though always she had loved light and darkness and rain and sun and snow and the red leaf-whispering dawns of autumn and the half-sad half-sweet twilights of spring when the whippoorwills began their plaintive callings and the short gray days of winter with the hills secret and shut into themselves against the shrieking, clawing wild beast of the wind. But tonight the world seemed even better and more worthy of her love.
    On one side of the hill pasture lay a field of knee-high corn, the freshly plowed dark earth glistening with drops of dew, fine like seed pearls she had read about in school. She smelled the earth and the sweetish smell of the growing corn and loved that too, even as she remembered that sometime, once a long while ago in some vague, formless past when she