Free The Cove by Ron Rash Page B

even a live snake and she’d feature something about it that you didn’t know. Best of all, she made Laurel feel different in a good way, doing small things like hugging her every morning or letting her take the roll or ring the recess bell. One time when a town girl teased about her homespun dress, Miss Calicut told Laurel that the other girl was jealous because her own mother couldn’t sew. Whenever she made the highest test grade or won a spell down, Miss Calicut bragged on her and said Laurel had the smarts to be a tip-top schoolteacher, said it in front of the whole class. On that last day, Miss Calicut had given her the seventh-grade textbooks and a brand-new dictionary. For Laurel Shelton , with great expectations for one of my favorite students , Miss Calicut had written on the dictionary’s first page. She’d hugged Laurel and said that as bad as things were they’d get better. It will be good teacher practice for you, Miss Calicut told her, you’ll be your own pupil. Laurel had studied the books all that fall, working out the ciphering, reading, even making up tests for herself. She’d taught Hank some too, though he soon lost interest. But her father had got more needsome every day and by the new year all the books were skiffed with dust.
    Laurel lifted her finger from the last book, wiped the dust on her dress. She took the apron and pan off their pegs and the sack of green beans from the alcove. Once on the porch, she sat in a chair with the sack beside her and the pan at her feet. Laurel watched the men work as she snapped beans and tossed them in the pan. Walter had done this kind of work before. She heard it in the quick clap of the hammer strikes and the way Hank wasn’t stopping to show him how things were done. Surprising considering his smooth hands, his making a living with the flute.
    As Laurel set another handful of beans in her lap, she thought about Walter not hiding the sixty dollars. Even if it was gold, the chain and medallion wouldn’t up-scale a quarter eagle, and why not hide the flute? A man with lots of swivels to him. He hid one thing but not another, gaumy as any boxcar tramp but with money and silver and gold, couldn’t talk or read or write but played the flute so pretty your heart near busted from the wonder of it, a man who made notice of a single green feather. All Laurel knew certain was that she wanted to know more about him and was glad he hadn’t left.
    He brightens up my life. That’s what Marcie said about Robbie, and that was what Walter did. But brightness never stayed long here. Laurel had learned the true of that as a child. The parakeets had flown over the cove like a dense green cloud, but they’d never paused in their passing, never circled or landed. Instead, the birds went over the cove the same way they would a deep murky pond. But one time it was full noon, the few minutes when enough light sifted in for the parakeets to see the orchard and its shriveled fruit. The flock curved back, low enough that Laurel could hear them calling we we we as they bunched above the orchard and began swirling downward. One by one, the birds sleeved the orchard limbs in green and orange and yellow. Laurel had been in the cornfield with Hank. She should have run into the orchard right then and chased them away, but she’d just stood watching as two dozen birds pecked and hopped and preened among the branches. It was like their bodies had knit together and lifted the whole cove skyward into the sun’s full light.
    When her mother saw the parakeets, she’d run to the cabin. Laurel’s father had hobbled onto the porch shirtless and barefoot, shotgun in hand, swearing he’d not allow what paltry fruit they had to be taken. Her father had moved unsteadily into the pasture, Laurel’s mother beside him with a hay fork. Laurel tried to speak, but no words came. It was Hank who spoke.
    â€œJust scare them away,