Read Online Maud's Line by Margaret Verble - Free Book Online Page A

Along.” After only a few bars, she bolted up with the notion that she needed to retrace her steps quickly and get to Booker before other girls started swishing their skirts around him. The very thought of him clasping some girl’s forearm and twirling her around made her feel as frantic as if she’d found a thief in the house. She passed the clumps of blanket Indians so quickly that she didn’t smell the smoke from their pipes and cigarettes, nor did she realize that she’d stepped right into the middle of a penny-pitching contest that stopped to let her go by.
    When she got to the dance corner and saw all the men, women, and children standing at the edge of the square just tapping their toes and not yet dancing, she felt foolish. She knew as well as anyone that nobody danced the first dance and that all parties had to get started by some brave couple who took the floor (or the watered-down dust) and showed off enough to erase everybody else’s embarrassment. Her uncle Ryde yelled out, “Who’s gonna claim this ground?” and Maud craned her neck to see one of the Benge boys and his new wife step into the patch. The Benges were kin to nearly everybody standing around the dirt square and the new couple was, Maud agreed, the most attractive in town. So by the time the fiddlers started “Red Robin” again, four squares of couples had moved into position. Booker wasn’t in any of the squares, and the crowd in front of Maud had thinned out enough that she could see the onlookers on the two other sides of the patch as well as she could see the stage where Ryde and the other fiddlers were. She scanned the crowd. Booker wasn’t in it.
    About that time, she felt a tap on the shoulder. Jimmy Foreman, a good-looking, skinny boy she’d known most of her life, led her into the dirt. They joined a new square and danced two more dances before Jimmy was cut in on by Henry Swimmer and Henry was cut in on by John Leeds. Maud decided that she looked better on the floor than she would’ve looked standing around it and that dancing was the best place to be appreciated by Booker. She figured he must be looking on, even if, as her eyes searched the rims of the dance patch, she couldn’t locate him. The light was now entirely cast by lanterns. Maud couldn’t make out the blue except in her imagination. But she could see a canvas roll. Booker’s wagon was still there.
    And it continued to be when the fiddlers broke and the dancers went off in clumps to drink lemonade or stronger brew sold out of the trunks of cars. But Maud, instead of availing herself of any refreshment, took the break as an opportunity to do what she’d been wanting to do for at least five dances. That was to go to Booker since he wasn’t coming to her. But as soon as she reached an angle where she could see the wagon and its owner well enough, she realized that Booker was there to sell, not to dance. She felt foolish for having spent so much time thinking anything else. He was beside his wagon, holding a pot out to a woman she couldn’t place. But she could tell from a distance that Booker was reciting the advantages of that particular pot over all others on this Earth or any other planet.
    Maud felt a jab of jealousy. She fought an urge to stride over to the wagon, grab that pot, and buy it herself. To contain that feeling, she looked around at the people who had wandered in back of the stage, and she saw, at a distance, Billy Walkingstick. He was talking to two other boys she knew, but she also knew she could lure Billy into anything, even a briar patch. So she walked in a direction that would both avoid the wagon and catch Billy’s eye, and sure enough, like a bass following a lure, Billy disengaged himself from his friends, and shouted, “Hey, Maud, don’t be highfaluting.”
    Maud replied, “Oh, Billy, you surprised me. I didn’t know you’d taken up square