Free The Centaur by John Updike

Dream of rabbits?
Rabbits!
” It was delicious, the way my voice made her swirl, thrust, wag, and whine.
    As I squatted, the cold came up behind me and squeezed my back. When I stood, the squares of wire my hands had touched were black, my skin having melted the patina of frost. Lady leaped like a spring released. She came down with a foot on her pan and flipped it over and I expected to see water spill. But the water was ice solid with the pan. For the instant before my brain caught up with my eyes, it seemed a miracle.
    Now the air, unflawed by any motion of wind, began to cake around me, and I moved quickly. My toothbrush, glazed rigid, was of a piece with the aluminum holder screwed to the porch post. I snapped it free. The pump dragged dry for four heaves of the handle. The water, on the fifth stroke rising from deep in the stricken earth, smoked faintly as it splashedthe grooved brown glacier that had built up in the pump trough. The rusty water purged the brush of its stiff jacket, but when I put it in my mouth it was like a flavorless square lollipop. My molars stung along the edges of their fillings. The toothpaste secreted in the bristles melted into a mint taste. All the time, Lady watched my performance with a wild delight that swelled and twitched her body, and when I spat, she barked in applause, each bark a puff of frost. I replaced the brush and bowed, and had the satisfaction of hearing the applause continue as I retired behind the double curtain, the storm door and the main door.
    The clocks now said 7:35 and 7:28. The great wash of warm air within the honey-colored kitchen made my movements lazy, though the clocks jabbed at me. “Why is the dog barking?” my mother asked.
    “She’s freezing to death,” I said. “It’s too cold out there; why can’t she come in?”
    “Cruellest thing you can do to a dog, Peter,” my father called, invisible. “Get her used to being in the house she’ll die of pneumonia like the last dog we had. Don’t take an animal out of nature. Hey Cassie: what time is it?”
    “Which clock?”
    “My clock.”
    “A little after seven-thirty. The other has it before.”
    “We gotta go, kid. We gotta move.”
    My mother said to me, “Eat up, Peter,” and to him, “That cheap clock of yours runs ahead of time, George. Grandad’s clock says you have five minutes.”
    “That’s not a cheap clock. That clock was thirteen dollars retail, Cassie. It’s General Electric. If it says twenty of, I’m late already. Gobble your coffee, kid. Time and tide for no man wait.”
    “For a man with a spider in his bowel,” my mother said, “you’re awfully full of pep.” To me she said, “Peter, don’t you hear your father?”
    I had been admiring a section of lavender shadow under the walnut tree in my painting of the old yard. I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife, one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art. For it is at about that age, isn’t it, that it sinks in upon us that things do, if not die, certainly change, wiggle, slide, retreat, and, like the dabs of sunlight on the bricks under a grape arbor on a breezy June day, shuffle out of all identity?
    “Peter.”
My mother said it in the voice that had no margin left.
    I drank the orange juice in two swigs and said, to worry her, “The poor dog is out there without even anything to drink, she’s just licking this big chunk of ice in her pan.”
    My grandfather stirred in the other room and pronounced, “Now that was a favorite saying of Jake Beam’s, who used to be stationmaster at the old Bertha Furnace station, before they discon-tinued the passenger station. ‘Time and tide,’ he would say,