My Old True Love Read Online Free PDF

around and sending out little ragged bits like arms and fingers, reaching and touching. Little towhees would come spiraling up off the limbs of the jack pines and dive right over what looked like the edge of the world. About halfway down you’d come out of a switchback and step right out of the clouds but they’d be right above your head, the bottom all bruised-looking with fat flakes of snow falling straight down. And as far as you could see, which was awfully far, was the world made soft by snow. “Granny’s beat-up egg whites,” Larkin would always say. God, I loved him and the things he’d say sometimes. And we’d all three just sing.
    Hackley’s voice was always certain, wrapping sure and confident around each note, moving along easy, up and down. Oh, but Larkin’s was a wonderment, pure and clear, hitting them high notes and holding them, holding them.
    Little Marg’ret a-setting in her high hall chair
Combing back her long yeller hair
Saw Sweet William and his new maid bride
Riding up the road so near.
    She threw down her ivory comb,
Threw back her long yeller hair,
Said, “I’ll go down and bid him farewell
And never more go there.”
    It was late in the night,
They were fast asleep.
Little Marg’ret appeared all dressed in white
Standing at their bed feet.
    “How do ye like your snow-white pillow?
How do ye like your sheets?
How do ye like that pretty fair maid
That lays in your arms asleep?”
    “Very well do I like my snow white pillow,
Well do I like my sheet,
Much better do I like that pretty fair maid
That stands at my bed feet.”
    He called his serving man to go
Saddle the dappled roan
And he went to her father’s house that night
And knocked on the door alone.
    “Is Little Marg’ret in her room?
Or is she in the hall?”
“Little Marg’ret’s in her cold black coffin
With her face turned toward the wall.”
    “Unfold, unfold those snow-white robes,
Be they ever so fine,
For I want to kiss them cold, corpsey lips,
For I know they’ll never kiss mine.”
    Three times he kissed her cold, cold chin,
Twice’t he kissed her cheek.
Once’t he kissed her cold, corpsey lips
And fell in her arms asleep.
    Larkin never even strained on the high notes that had me screeching at the top of my lungs. It’s a good thing he didn’t have to study awfully much about the tune because he just lost himself in them stories. When he was little he’d put his own self
right there,
living it, breathing life into it. Listening to him sing never failed to jerk goose-bumps up on my arms. Even Hackley, who went along not noticing much, would sometimes stare at him and say something like, “Damn boy.”
    But they was no beating Hackley when it come to a tune. He went whistling one all the time and once’t he could whistle it good he could play it on the fiddle. Oh, how he could make them strings pull at your insides. “Your very guts,” Granny said. When he took a hold of a bow, that fiddle might as well get ready because it was going to
weep
. Don’t git me wrong, many was the time I watched all the girls go hungry-eyed when he’d commence to singing. But they went plumb foolish when he played. And Hackley loved the girls, any shape and any size. So he played a lot.
    But even then, with Mary fixing to turn eleven and him just thirteen, Hackley told Larkin that day he wanted her for his own and aimed to marry her one day.
    Larkin said they’d built a lean-to right next to the creek out of pine boughs and had a big fire going. Hackley was stretched out with his feet almost in the flames and Larkin was setting out in the weather.
    “I can hear the snow falling all around me,” he said. And Hack-ley had answered with the same thing I often said: “You say the damnedest things.”
    But if you think about it, you
can
hear snow falling all crackly-like.
    They stayed around down there most of that day, playing in the snow, laying by the fire, eating what they’d brung with them. “I purely love this time of