Read Online Of Time and Memory by Don J. Snyder - Free Book Online Page A

where to start.” He’s an early riser out of habit, a carpenter who always prided himself on being the first one at George Snyder’s lumberyard each day to pick up his stock. He is an old man with a head of white waves, but his body is as hard as wood. “You have to be strong in this life, Peggy,” he has always told her. It is his battle cry and whenever he says it, it makes Peggy wonder just how strong she is, and will have to be.
    He wants to show her what he has made with his big square hands. He is very pleased with himself when he takes it from the vise that he has screwed to the kitchen table so the glue would dry overnight. It’s a kind of wedge that he has carved out of wood and attached to the sole of his right shoe to compensate for the leg that has withered since his accident. The doctor had wanted to amputate the leg, but he healed it on his own, though it has shrunk three inches now. “How do you like it, what do you think?” he asks Peggy.
    He wants to try it on and give it a test right now. She watches him walk to the sink and back, clomping like a horse. It is Peggy’s idea to put it to the real test. A few dance steps—not a slow dance, but the jitterbug.
    â€œThe jitterbug?” he asks.
    â€œYou have to be strong in this life!” she tells him with her green eyes brightening.
    He is whirling her around, smiling back with pride. She has a new move, a little slide step that she has been rehearsing in her room with the door closed. When she shows him, he raises his eyebrows appreciatively. It makes her feel lucky to have been born at a time when the deep, driving bass notes of the dance music of America match so completely the rhythms of her heart.
    She lays some coal in the cookstove and makes oatmeal for the two of them. “No cream,” she tells him, “only skim milk.”
    â€œYou could afford to put on a little weight. You’ll dance it off anyway at the rate you’re going these days. Out every night. Do you ever dance with the same boy twice?”
    â€œHaven’t found one yet who can keep up with me. Now eat your oatmeal and stop snooping.”
    She thinks of him now, the boy she met last Friday night at Sunnybrook in Pottstown. Who’s the skinny guy with the angel? she’d overheard someone ask.
The skinny guy and the angel
 … She smiles to herself as she thinks about how he kept hitching up his flannel trousers. Maybe they fit him before he went to the war. From the big bay window in the dance hall he pointed out his new Chevy.
    â€œIt’s the convertible,” he said with pleasure. “The green one over there.”
    It was too dark to see but she told him it looked like a fine automobile.
    She had one dance and one glass of punch in cut crystal cups. He offered her a cigarette which she declined.
    â€œSo, what do you do with yourself?” he asked her.
    She told him that she was working at the telephone company in Lansdale, saving her money to move somewhere.
    â€œMove somewhere?”
    â€œMaybe to a big city like New York.”
    A sad look passed over his face, and she would have taken note of this.
    But he recovered quickly and said he didn’t know why anyone would want to leave this part of Pennsylvania. He was so glad to be back after two years in the army. The first thing he had done when he got home was drive up and down every street in Skippack, where he’d been a boy. Down the streets where he used to deliver newspapers on his bicycle.
    He paused then and Peggy thought he had gone down all the old streets to see how things had changed since he’d left for the war.
    And what he said next was what she would remember to tell her aunt. He had looked right into her eyes with his lit-up smile and said, “Mostly, I guess I did it to see how
I’d
changed.”
    Later that spring she overhears one of the girls at the telephone company telling someone about a man on the