Read Online The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass - Free Book Online

down.
    â€œWould you have loved her if she were not fat?” I asked Vern. He leaned back and roared with laughter, shaking with it, delighted with the thought, and with the simplicity of such an idea.
    One day we watched as the carpenters came and widened all her doorways for her, so that she could fit through them more easily. I wondered if it embarrassed Wejumpka to have a mother so large; I wondered what he thought about Vern’s breath, about Vern always being drunk.
    But Wejumpka still seemed to be his usual self. It was almost as if he thought that these things did not matter, or that they were of a lesser importance—though I had no idea what, then, he thought
was
important. Sometimes we’d watch the house on weekends, in the broad middle of the day, though it was riskier; and we’d open the windows in the fall just to get some fresh air moving through the rented house and to listen to the street and neighborhood sounds—lawn mowers, boys raking, motor scooters, the whole fall list—and in the late afternoon we could hear Wejumpka sitting on the back porch playing his harmonica; a faint sound of which we heard only parts, while the rest of it was washed down the street along with tumbling dry leaves by the winds that moved through the neighborhood.
    â€œHe’s blowing it like a signal,” Vern would say. There is no excusing a drunk, no reasoning with him, and he’d be certain of it, swearing up and down and crying that Wejumpka wanted to see him, that that was the reason he was out there by himself playing the harmonica, and Vern would jump up and go tearing down the stairs, pulling his jacket on, running as if to rescue Wejumpka from a burning house, running out into the purple gloom of dusk and across the street, out into the crisp night, and I’d be running behind him, trying to catch up and to keep him from harm.
    Vern’s shirttail would be out, his shoelaces untied, his jacket on inside out; he’d go tearing through the hedge toward Wejumpka, who, thank God, was always alone, always
playing the harmonica by himself and sometimes even humming or singing. Had Ann seen Vern that close to the center of the demilitarized zone, that far into it, she would surely have taken the hoe to him, with no emotion whatsoever, merely striking at him as she would a weed until he was no longer there—but she never saw him, and Vern would crawl under the bushes, through the hedge, and creep toward Wejumpka, crawling to stay out of Ann’s sight, and he’d go all the way up to where Wejumpka was sitting and rest his head on Wejumpka’s knee, reach up and tousle his hair, squeeze his shoulder, and say, “Hi, pal. How’s it going?”
    I do not think that Wejumpka ever associated his harmonica playing with these appearances by Vern. I do not think he ever realized that he was
summoning
Vern, like a bad genie from a bottle, by blowing the wistful notes; I think he merely played the harmonica and hummed as a way of breathing, of
feeling;
in the evenings, when it began to grow dark and things were not quite so clear, he would go sit with his dog, and hum, and sing. He had a fine, clear voice, though his harmonica playing was still a little unsure, a little quavery.
    He was always glad to see his father, though I could tell by the way he looked back at the house that his mother had instructed him, in her fat intuitiveness, what he should do if his father ever
did
approach him. But then he would look back down at Vern and put his harmonica down, smiling, and would pat Vern’s mussed-up hair, smoothing it into place, patting Vern as if he were a dog, while he patted Ossie with his other hand.
    They’d sit there like that, with night coming down and stars coming up through the trees, until I could stand the tension no longer; and I’d come out of the bushes and help
Vern sit up, and tell Wejumpka that we had to go now, and, strangely, Vern always let me