Free Wild Life by Molly Gloss Page B

“Well, Sheets,” I said, “here are your dry spring days,” for Sheets’s foretellings of the coming year’s weather have always been widely celebrated, and the
Skamokawa Eagle
annually has sent someone to ask after his predictions. Last January’s clipping is still pinned to the wall of my kitchen. “
Sky’ll clear up a good week in all, around the end of March,” pronounced the Skamokawa Weather Prophet, and upon being reminded that the town receives an average fifteen inches of rain in the month of March, replied, “Well I guess rain will fall hard on the other twenty-five of the days.
”
    He solemnly pulled on the cigar while he considered my remark, and then, with a practiced slanting motion of his head, released a plume of smoke toward the sky. “It’s a mystery of the Lord, I expect.”
    I have heard of hermits more intent on their solitude than Sheets. There is a couple living eight miles up the Left Fork who grow their own garden, hay field, berries, and fruit, and have been to town only twice in anyone’s memory, each time the wife arriving in her wedding suit and high-topped old shoes. And my dog, Buster, may be crazier than old Sheets: he is afraid of certain dread spots in the front hallway and the kitchen, and will go to any lengths to keep from stepping upon them. What I believe may be Sheets’s singular glory is his raising of tobacco in a climate such as this one, where the sun arriving on the first of April must be pronounced a mythic creature, and a sign of God’s wonders.
    While we strolled up and down admiring his rows of strawberries, the small rosettes of new green growth among the brown and withered leaves of the summer past, I asked after his prospects for a good crop and listened as he told the coming weather and in his customary way tolled the names of the dead, among them his sisters and his mother and old acquaintances of his childhood. He lives alone, and I’ve always understood his lunacy to be a kind of loneliness. But when he walked me back across the hill to Margaret he began suddenly to give me his advice about the little witches who will come and live right under the floor of your house if you let them, and must be driven out by pouring boiling water through the cracks; and this brought me up a little.
    In my childhood, if Sheets had carried a pistol in his belt and cited the old poets, I suppose Teddy and I would have made him over into a Hero, but as it was, we thought he was a holy oracle, a Wizard. Sitting with him at the top of his hill, the three of us soberly smoking, we would often ask for his prophesies on matters more momentous to us than the weather:
Will the flood get as high as our house? Will Pearl’s calf be a heifer? Will Lester’s runt puppy die?
And without knowing who Lester was, or any of the other circumstances of our question, he would simply take the cigar from his mouth and answer yes or no; and the future, we knew, would be sealed.
    Of course, it’s been years since I’ve asked for one of Sheets’s divinations or believed in them. But walking back across his hill—I don’t know why—I had meant to ask the old man whether Harriet would be safely found. And I suppose it was his quiet rant which closed my mouth; or I had a qualm of good sense, or of dread.
    Â 
When anything in [my books] is rather strange and
outré,
it is probably drawn straight from nature as close as I could draw it; when it is plausible, there is probably no particular and especial foundation for it.
S AMUEL B UTLER

On the boat landing (Skamokawa), Sat’y night
    I write this hurriedly while the
Telephone
is making her approach.
    It is a mild paradox, I suppose, that plots taken from real life often are the harder to believe. In the dime novel, misadventure and misfortune are discreetly foreshadowed; one expects a heroine to suffer adversity and equally expects the outcome to be