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Show £3.2 that much concern, that cool a touch. For after all, she was my first love. I remembered Lois my second love too. She had gone to the country school I left, but I had never seen her in highschool and now I wondered if her family had moved entirely out of the country. I couldn't quite remember. My third love and I were now friends in Chicago, only friends. I hardly saw §j£r, hadn't seen her for a month, though Ben said that Amelia said that £xse was seeing more and more of John Tobin. I wasn't surprised. I had so many memory-dreams of my father that I could not summon them all. I remembered back to before school when I was so small that once when I followed him into the fiftldsy he had put me to £-l-e*V in the bottom of an unused ditch, its banks overgrown so that it was shady and cool and dim, slightly moist, with a friendly bug or two, later awakening me for the walk back home, my short legs tiring and the man lifting me easily up astride his shoulders, walking along in his rubber irrigating boots, carrying his shovel like a rifle in one hand, me holding on with both hands under his chin. I remembered him in the kitchen early in the morning making a batch of baking-powder biscuits; or standing in the fields and pulling his big watch out of his small pocket, consulting it and then looking up as if to see whether oY H°* the sun was on time; or unbuttoning his jeans to piss, the great vein in his penis and the powerful stream smacking the earth in boiling foam; or him standing on the top of a stack of new hay, hat pushed back, leaning on his pitchfork while he waited for the next slip-load of hay to be drawn up to him by the Mormon derrick. I surely remember him getting kicked by^tote and crawling to the house and how I had come upon him down around the ^a.r&%e, J^te^iiji^^i^hi^ f^^^^a^e^Jir^^^ g^own father down crawling on the ground.1 I had knelt to him, I had lifted him, straining to be his leg for the one kicked, rising powerfully to be his strength for his maimed testicles, and helped him on to the house. At that moment I would have U given my life for him. |