Sleeping in the hayloft - Part 3
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She's talking about the hayloft, but I'm thinking about Laurie right now. I dont' even know the last name of the girl from Sunday School class, but she believes in the farm back in Oklahoma about as much as I do. She doesn't hear the words exactly the way I say them or write them down when I describe it for her though because she's deaf as a door nail. And she can't talk either. I've never known anyone like her before. I imagine all of the words coming at her swirling around in her soundless head, where they get hung up on pegs like you would a shirt or a gingham dress or a pair of pants.
Or on a laundry line like where my Grandma Butler hangs her wash in the front yard with the hens pecking beneath her feet. In front of her tar-papered house that looks like bricks, but it's really only drawings of bricks once you get up close to it. My grandma never had any shoes in the winter time when she was my age, and when they let her go to school, she went there barefoot until she grew up and got too embarassed to come any more. Also when she was a girl her brother and her were in the root cellar when a big black panther leapt across the door right above their heads, and his shadow nearly sliced them in two. That cat scrawled his name with his claws in the trunk of the sycamore tree in their front yard, and the old milk cow never ever would give any milk again.
I come by it honestly.
"Yes, of course, silly." Bobbie's cheeks redden, and I feel bad for the way that popped out of me all sarcastic, like my mom says is not very nice. That's probably what she'd say about telling all these other girls such a packful of lies too. I grin at Bobbie real friendly, squeeze her arm that's linked with mine, and then it's OK. "At night time, all of us kids climb up into the hayloft. We hunker down underneath the patchwork coverlets and tell stories. You can hear the horses in their stalls beneath the floorboards munching their oats or stamping a hoof."
We pause as a whole line of first graders comes by us crackin' the whip around third base, a rooster tail of mud behind them.
