AEgypt Read Online Free PDF Page B

arm; Pierce laughed, the dog barked, the whole straggling line of them left town.
    This Spofford had once, some years before, been Pierce's student; he had been, in fact, among Pierce's first students at Barnabas College, trying out education on the GI Bill or its Vietnam equivalent. Pierce remembered him sitting in History One earnest and attentive in his fatigue jacket (SPOFFORD on the white tape over his breast pocket), seeming displaced and unlikely there. He was only three or four years younger than Pierce, whose first real gig that was ("gig” they called it in those days; Pierce had been doing a long gig in graduate school while Spofford did his gig in Vietnam). With the same GI money, Spofford had opened a small joinery shop in Pierce's low-rent neighborhood, doing fine spare pieces with a skill that Pierce envied and enjoyed watching. They'd become friends, had even briefly shared a girlfriend—quite literally one night, a night to remember—and though radically different in many ways, had, while drifting away from each other, never quite drifted apart. Spofford soon quit school, and then the city, taking his skills back to his native country, and Pierce would now and then get a letter in Spofford's miniscule and perfectly legible hand, noting his progress and inviting Pierce to visit.
    And here at last he was. Spofford, nut-brown and hale, ragged straw hat and crook, looked well, suited; Pierce felt a surge of something like gratitude. The streets of the city were littered with Spoffords who had not escaped. When he grinned sidelong at Pierce—no doubt assessing Pierce in return—his teeth shone white in his big face, save for one central upper, dead and gray. “So here you are,” he said, offering his world with a sweep of his arm.
    Pierce looked over where he was. They had ascended the meadows of a tall hill's folded basis; its wooded heights rose beside them. The valley and its twinkling river lay below. There is almost a music in such summer views, an airy exhalation of soprano voices; Pierce didn't know whether the music which always used to accompany the opening scenes of pastoral cartoons, Disney's especially (music that the animated hills and trees sang, dancing slightly), was a transcription of this music he seemed now to hear, or whether this music was only his own memory of that. He laughed to hear it. “Nice,” he said. “What river is that?"
    "The Blackberry,” Spofford said.
    "Nice,” said Pierce. “The Blackberry."
    "The mountain is Mount Randa,” Spofford said. “From the top you can see over into three different states, up into New York, down into Pennsylvania, over into New Jersey. A long view. There's a monument up there, where a guy had a vision."
    "Of three states?"
    "I dunno. Something religious. He started a religion."
    "Hm.” Pierce could see no monument.
    "We could climb it. There's a path."
    "Hey, may be,” said Pierce, his breath already short from this gentle incline. The dog, Rover the drover, barked impatiently from on ahead: his four-legged charges were getting on all right, his tall ones were malingering.
    "Are these guys yours, by the way?” Pierce asked, amid the sheep, looking down into their silly upturned faces.
    "Mine,” said Spofford. “As of today.” He tapped the hind legs of a laggard with a practiced motion of his crook's end, it bleated and hurried on. “Did some work for a guy this summer. Raising a barn, carpentry. We made a trade."
    "You needed sheep?"
    "I like sheep,” Spofford said mildly, surveying his own.
    "Well, who doesn't,” Pierce said laughing. “All we like sheep.” He sang it out, from Handel's Messiah : “All we like sheep. All we—like—sheep...."
    Spofford took up the tune (he and Pierce had sung it together in a come-all-ye version one winter in the Village) and so they went singing up the meadow:
    All we like sheep
    All we like sheep
    Have gone astray; have gone astray
    Every one to his own way.
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