Grand Change Read Online Free PDF

overshot the cellar hole and had trouble getting backed around and wound up taking a turn around the house to get lined up. When he began letting the filled bags down the cellar hole to me, his hands worked in a ponder. More than once, he absently let down a bag open-end first, sending a barrage of loose potatoes and dust at me, augmenting my agony of having to crawl, haul dumping on my belly, to the corner where the potatoes were piled to within a few feet of the floor joists. Different times, as we unhitched the horses and watered them, lead them to their stalls and their dinner, his head shot toward the road.
    After a dinner of potatoes, thick slabs of pork, jimmies and thick gravy, topped off with bread pudding with raisins, we sat in the drowsy warmth of the kitchen, with the sun slanting through the window and cutting through the wave of tobacco smoke hovering above The Old Man. He was sitting sprawled sideways across the couch, hidden from the waist up by the newspaper he was reading. The farm noon radio was running the deaths, stock prices and news. Nanny, with the dishes done, had somehow found the incentive to knit. I sat flopped in the armchair by the radio, one foot resting on the steel end of the couch, in some kind of drowse, the whine of the dying kettle, the clicks of Nanny’s knitting needles and the drone of the radio drifting at me as in a dream.
    Different times during the news The Old Man, listening while he read, called to Nanny for a prompt, something he only did when his mind was distracted by something.
    The tiredness grabbed me then, boxing me in, and it was hard to break out when The Old Man’s feet thumped the floor. We had the horses out of their stalls and half hitched before I fully snapped to life.
    We finished in mid-afternoon. As we worked, The Old Man looked intermittently toward the road, and when we rode from the field, desert-like now with the skeletal digger standing singular and lonely, he glanced once more.
    John Cobly came that evening at about the time when the weariness of the day had given way to relaxation and it was good to read the funny papers with my feet on the stove’s oven door. Nanny was clicking her needles close to the lamp side of the table. The Old Man sat hunched at the end, musing at solitaire, working his dog-eared cards in shadowy flops. The clicks, flops, burr of the fire and hum of the kettle were spacing into a comedy show on the radio with its patented laughs.
    John was a stubby little man with a pinkish face and freckles. Most called him “bran face” when he wasn’t around. His farm was just west of the swamp bog on the west side of the road. There was just him and his wife, Agnes, working their farm with seasonal help. Their daughter was married to a banker in the city. Their two sons were in the Air Force.
    He came twirling in around the door without waiting for an answer to his knock and flopped into the armchair. Nanny and I returned his greeting. The Old Man just grunted without a pause in his solitaire.
    John paused for a few moments in the armchair, then rose and stood over The Boss, peering down his nose, his eyes shifting with the card flops. “King of diamonds on the queen, Harv… You missed the ten,” he said, his words bursting almost in sync with the punchlines of the radio comedy. “You missed the six of clubs; you’re never going to win that way, Harv. But maybe that’s your strategy?” The Old Man just kept flopping the cards in his muse.
    John Cobly settled back down in the armchair. “What are you knitting, Ella?” he said. Nanny held up a half mitt with the needles angling from a decapitated-like thumb. John shook his head.
    â€œDon’t know how you do that. With my ten thumbs there would be needles sticking out of me all angles. I’d look like a pincushion.”
    â€œHow’s Agnes these days?” Nanny said.
    â€œCranky as ever… Ah, she’s all right.