Read Online Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse - Free Book Online Page A

baskets of food.
    She’s a good cook
    without showing off.
    She has a way of making my father do things.
    When Louise came to dinner,
    Daddy got up and cleaned the kitchen when we were
    done eating.
    He tied an apron around his middle
    and he looked silly as a cow
    stuck in a hole,
    but Louise ignored that,
    and I took a lesson from her.
    We walked around the farm
    even though she’d probably already seen it
    while I was gone.
    She didn’t ask to be taken to my favorite places,
    the loft in the barn,
    the banks of the Beaver,
    the field where you can
    see Black Mesa on a clear day.
    She told me
    she knew Daddy and I had a history before her,
    and she wished she’d been there for the whole thing,
    but she wasn’t and there wasn’t anything to do
    but get over it and get on.
    We both stared in wonder
    at the pond my daddy made
    and she said,
    a hole like that says a lot about a man.
    I didn’t intend to, but I liked her,
    because she was so plain and so honest,
    and because she made Daddy laugh,
    and me, too, just like that,
    and even though I didn’t know
    if there was room for her
    in me, I could see there was room for her in Daddy.
    When I asked him if he wanted me
    to go off to Aunt Ellis after all,
    Daddy said he hadn’t ever wanted it,
    he said I was his own and he didn’t like to
    think about what Aunt Ellis might do with me.
    And we laughed, picturing me and Aunt Ellis
    together,
    and it wasn’t a nice laugh, but it was
    Aunt Ellis we were talking about after all.
    The thing about Louise,
    I’ll just have to watch how things go and hope
    she doesn’t crowd me out of Daddy’s life, not now,
    when I am just finding my way back into it.
    October 1935

Not Everywhere
    I walk with Daddy
    up the slope and look out over the Beaver River.
    Louise is back at the house.
    She wanted to come
    but this is Ma’s place,
    Ma’s grave,
    Franklin’s too,
    and Louise has no business here.
    She wants to come everywhere with us.
    Well, I won’t let her.
    Not everywhere.
    Daddy says,
    “She could have come.
    There’s room enough for everyone, Billie Jo.”
    But there’s not.
    She can come into Ma’s kitchen.
    She can hang around the barn.
    She can sit beside Daddy when he drives the truck.
    But Ma’s bones are in this hill,
    Ma’s and Franklin’s.
    And their bones wouldn’t like it,
    if Louise came walking up here between us.
    October 1935

My Life, or What I Told Louise After the Tenth Time She Came to Dinner
    “I may look like Daddy, but I have my mother’s
    hands.
    Piano hands, Ma called them,
    sneaking a look at them any chance she got.
    A piano is a grand thing,”I say.
    “Though ours is covered in dust now.
    Under the grime it’s dark brown,
    like my mother’s eyes.”
    I think about the piano
    and how above it hangs a mirror
    and to either side of that mirror,
    shelves,
    where Ma and Daddy’s wedding picture once stood,
    though Daddy has taken that down.
    “Whenever she could,
    Ma filled a bowl with apples,” I tell Louise.
    “I’m crazy about apples,
    and she filled a jar with wildflowers when she
    found them,
    and put them on that shelf above the piano.”
    On the other shelf Ma’s book of poetry remains.
    And the invitation from Aunt Ellis,
    or what’s left of it.
    Daddy and I tore it into strips
    to mark the poems we thought Ma liked best.
    “We weren’t always happy,” I tell Louise.
    “But we were happy enough
    until the accident.
    When I rode the train west,
    I went looking for something,
    but I didn’t see anything wonderful.
    I didn’t see anything better than what I already had.
    Home.”
    I look straight into Louise’s face.
    Louise doesn’t flinch.
    She looks straight back.
    I am the first one to back down.
    “My hands don’t look real pretty anymore.
    But they hardly hurt. They only ache a little,
    sometimes.
    I could play right now,
    maybe,
    if I could get the dust out of the piano,
    if I wanted to get the dust out of the piano.
    But I don’t. I’m not ready yet.”
    And