OCR Text |
Show CALL ACROSS THE YEARS Those summers, sundowns came late but never late enough to find us sleepy. My brother and I would sit back to back in the cut field's cool grass and watch the bats wheel and dip in the wind of their making. Or walk to the dusk trees where fireflies sprouted like berries and floated into our open hands. Sleep, she said, though sometimes later the wind rose and touched us in our sheets. Sleep, though sometimes the curtains wheezed and the trees clawed the sideboards and shingles and the smokehouse rattled in its tin. Those mornings, when we woke, we found the world shiny with the pools of our dreams. 2. That was the land of sun and rain, of play and sleep, nineteen sixty-something every year. But one night the deep rumble that swept our field so often with its wind, a distant sigh, came harder, farther. We woke calling across the dark of our room which was already thick with grit. Leaves flew wild as bats above our beds. It was no dream though we lay still as feigned sleep, though the curtains whipped themselves white, though outside the trees were breaking our toys: sling-shot, treehouse, swing. . . |