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Show in my father's house/ 4 steps of the grey house where I had been born. As soon as I was old enough to walk, a plethora of older brothers and sisters had taught me to count, marching me up and down these concrete steps which my father had laid. He had built the frames and smoothed the cement sometime during the polygamy trials of 1944 which had sent him to prison, the time the mothers referred to as "when Daddy went away to College." Two hundred steps from the back porch of the grey house stood a big, red barn, dark wonderful womb of hiding places and sour animal smells, of bristly ropes and slivery sticks of wood, of mangers and grain bins and rusty tools. We twenty-odd chil dren headed for this beloved retreat to laugh and sing at our own echoes, to join in our most raucous games, or to secret ourselves in its comforting corners when we wanted to be alone. In the early morning, no one played in the barn, for there was work to be done. The barn doors, flung open, released air saturated with urine and musty hay. By the time I reached the barn that morning, my oldest brothers Saul and Isaac, were scooping out stalls and filling the mangers with fresh hay. My father balanced on a one-legged stool, the shiny pail fixed between his knees. He patted old Bossy's flank and spoke soothingly as he curled his long fingers around her teats, sending a gentle tintinnabulum to the rafters as the first jets sang into the pail. |