Dolores Claiborne Read Online Free PDF Page A

flapped by a good south wind. But there were plenty of winter mornins when it was just ten degrees and the wind was strong and damp and comin from the east, straight in off the Atlantic. On mornins like that I would have given up that sweet smell without a peep of argument. Hangin sheets in deep cold is a kind of torture. Nobody knows what it’s like unless they’ve done it, and once you’ve done it, you never ever forget it.
    You take the basket out to the lines, and the steam comes risin off the top, and the first sheet is warm, and maybe you think to y‘self—if you ain’t never done it before, that is—“Aw, this ain’t so bad.” But by the time you’ve got that first one up, and the edges even, and those six pins on, it’s stopped steaming. It’s still wet, but now it’s cold, too. And your fingers are wet, and they’re cold. But you go on to the next one, and the next, and the next, and your fingers turn red, and they slow up, and your shoulders ache, and your mouth is cramped from holdin pins in it so your hands are free to keep that befrigged sheet nice and even the whole while, but most of the misery is right there in your fingers. If they’d go numb, that’d be one thing. You almost wish they would. But they just get red, and if there are enough sheets they go beyond that to a pale purple color, like the edges of some lilies. By the time you finish, your hands are really just claws. The worst thing, though, is you know what’s gonna happen when you finally get back inside with that empty laundry basket and the heat hits your hands. They start to tingle, and then they start to throb in the joints—only it’s a feelin so deep it’s really more like cryin than throbbin; I wish I could describe it to you so you’d know, Andy, but I can’t. Nancy Bannister there looks like she knows, a little bit, anyway, but there is a world of difference between hangin out your warsh on the mainland in winter and hangin it out on the island. When your fingers start to warm up again, it feels like there’s a hive of bugs in em. So you rub em all over with some kind of hand lotion and wait for the itch to go away, and you know it don’t matter how much store lotion or plain old sheep-dip you rub into your hands; by the end of February the skin is still going to be cracked so bad that it’ll break open and bleed if you clench a hard fist. And sometimes, even after you’ve gotten warm again and maybe even gone to bed, your hands will wake you up in the middle of the night, sobbin with the memory of that pain. You think I’m jokin? You can laugh if you want to, but I ain’t, not a bit. You can almost hear em, like little children who can’t find their mammas. It comes from deep inside, and you lie there and listen to it, knowin all the time that you’ll be goin back outside again just the same, nothin can stop it, and it’s all a part of woman’s work no man knows about or wants to know about.
    And while you were goin through that, hands numb, fingers purple, shoulders achin, snot leakin off the end of y’nose and freezin tight as a tick to your upper lip, she’d more often than not be standin or sittin there in her bedroom window, lookin out at you. Her forehead’d be furrowed and her lips drawed down and her hands workin on each other—all tensed up, she’d be, like it was some kind of complicated hospital operation instead of just hangin sheets out to dry in the winter wind. You could see her tryin to hold herself back, to keep her big trap shut this time, but after awhile she wouldn’t be able to no more and she’d throw up the window and lean out so that cold east wind streamed her hair back, and she’d howl down, “Six pins! Remember to use six pins! Don’t you let the wind blow my good sheets down to the corner of the yard! Mind me, now! You better, because I’m watching, and I’m counting!”
    By the time March came, I’d be dreamin of gettin the hatchet me n the hunky used to chop up