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Show in my father's house/ 248 Leora gasped out the story- My father left the room without speaking. Later, much later, he told Aunt Gerda she would be punished for cutting Leora's hair. "Her hair will never grow past her shoulder blades," he said. "And you won't be able to do anything about it." In later years, when Leora's hair did, in fact grow no longer than her scapula, I thought it a strange punishment for Aunt Gerda, who seemed not to care one way or another about Leora's hair. A more fitting punishment, I thought, was when Aunt Gerda had her own hair dyed blonde and most of it fell out. Also from Annette, I learned that it was Aunt Gerda who tore down Grandmother Allred's log house. I stood for a long time on the remaining platform and stared at the scraps of linoleum clinging to bare floor boards. An impression came to me of Grandmother in her grave and I began to weep, staring at the window of the grey house where she once rapped with her cane, a window with strange curtains how hung over it. Even the grounds seemed vacant, although many trees and bushes remained. Only a single cow, a sorroitfful creature with bones showing bellered each morning as my father milked her. With ducks gone, swimming pool slimy with moss, garden in ruin, and even the fruit from the orchard less sweet, more worm-riddled, I couldn't feel that I had truly come home. My father, perpetually irritable and always in a hurry, came in from milking, stomped dust from his good shoes, put on his suit coat and rushed off to work at his new office in Murray. Each evening, he stayed at Aunt Gerda's,not visiting the grey house |