Read Online The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time by Steven Sherrill - Free Book Online Page A

paint on the exterior a faded and chipped eggy yellow. A tattered old broom is propped by the front door. It’s an inside joke. It means the broom squire is looking for a wife. There is no porch, only a rough stone stoop. The floorboards creak when the Minotaur steps inside.
    The broom maker cuts loose right away. “Hey, hey, M! It’s hotter than a popcorn fart out there, isn’t it?”
    “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, unwilling to commit to either yes or no.
    “Not much cooler inside,” she says.
    Then the broom maker just keeps talking, but the Minotaur doesn’t listen. He leans against a high workbench, steadies himself against the surge of her words. The Minotaur waits to hear what she wants. It’s dry in the small building despite the warm Pennsylvania day. All that broom straw sucks the moisture from the air. The Minotaur’s skin begins to itch, especially at the seam. He can’t reach into his coat to rub at it. Not in public. The purplish ridge of flesh tightens, cinches the Minotaur’s chest.
    “Unngh,” he says.
    “I know,” the broom maker says. “I told the son of a bitch he’d better quit while he was ahead.”
    The Broom Shack has two windows, one by the front door, the other on the opposite wall, looking out at an unused part of Old Scald Village. Looking out over the marshy ditch at the back of the property, through the drooping cattails with their fat brown stamens to some unnamable detritus stacked along a chain-link fence. If you look, if you pay attention, you can see the trout. It’s massive, big as an old sedan, and made of plaster. A pale green motionless leviathan abandoned, propped pinkish belly up, mouth agape, against the fence. The Minotaur refuses to look into that black hole. No good could come of it. On a far hill, on the other side—and there is always an other side—a Jesus Is Lord billboard faces God knows where, aims at God knows who.
    “ . . . thicker than banjo players in hell,” the broom maker says.
    “Unngh.”
    The Minotaur likes the shop’s efficiency. The winder and the iron vise are where they ought to be. The foot treadle and the rack of knives with hammered blades, too. The Minotaur respects order. And the broom maker knows her way around. Besoms , she calls her brooms, because that’s what they’re called. When an audience is present, of any size, any makeup, the girl is all business in her role as living historian. She never breaks her version of character. But if it’s just her and the Minotaur (or any other village employee or volunteer) in the cabin, the broom maker—plump, filling up her floor-length calico (sometimes red, sometimes green) dress—gabbles and jabbers without ceasing. She’ll talk her way through round brooms and flat brooms. The Turkey Wing. The Cobweb Chaser. She talks and works. Her fingers are deft, quick, and sure.
    “Howdy!” she says to a soggy-eyed couple in matching American flag T-shirts. “Welcome to the Broom Shack.”
    In most of the Old Scald Village shops and buildings visitors are confined to a narrow patch of floor just inside the doorway, from which they watch and ask questions. Sometimes they’re corralled by a strand or two of dusty hemp rope. In the Broom Shack a low rail fence demarks the space. Separates worker from watcher. The Minotaur hasn’t yet crossed over, and now the old couple is in the way. He tries to blend in, somehow, with his horns and his Confederate uniform.
    “Oh,” the wife says to the Minotaur. Or at the Minotaur. She forces a smile and moves behind her husband, who makes do with a scowling nod.
    The Minotaur picks up a ball of stitching twine and pretends to do something with it. They’ll stay for bit (out of genuine interest or heat-driven indifference), and the broom maker will bandy about terms— head spray and binding and suitable tail .
    “Can’t forget the spick,” she’ll say, “or the head will just twist right off.”
    They seem the type, so the broom maker tells them