Some Things About Flying Read Online Free PDF Page B

hook, felt feverish with relief.
    The good part about going to see Aunt June, who was actually a neighbour, was that Lila’s grandmother would pack a small picnic and they’d head off, the two of them hand in hand together along the path the cattle and farm equipment used through the fields. Her grandmother identified birds, and pointed out groundhog holes, and she and Lila discussed the shapes of clouds and she called to the cattle, who each year frightened Lila for a while, until she got accustomed again to their peaceful, limpid curiosity.
    How old was she before she understood they were being fattened up for slaughter? She knows she saw her grandfather slightly differently then.
    Lila’s grandmother, who smelled of laundry, lilac and yeast, and who had many tones of voice, told her, “Be nice, now. I know June’s a little bit different, but she’s my very good friend.” She was, Lila guesses, her grandmother’s version of Patsy, or Nell; who are, as far as Lila knows, the only people in the world aware of where she is now and how she is spending these two weeks.
    When June was in her early twenties, a tractor rolled over on her father—“squashed him flat,” Lila’s grandmother said—and her mother died a few months later. “Broken heart.” Was that possible? It sounded terribly romantic.
    If Lila’s father died, Lila was sure her mother’s heart wouldn’t break. Her mother’s heart seemed more tuned to outside sorrows, and somewhat hardened to her own.
    Lila tried to imagine what would happen to herself and Don if either her father or her mother died. How they would feel. Her mind went blank; as, apparently, did June’s, more or less. She stayed on alone, on her little patch of land, but since, Lila’s grandmother said, she blamed machinery for her father’s death, and thus her mother’s, she refused, like a Mennonite, to have anything to do with it again. So she never drove a car, and wouldn’t have an electric stove. She had an old wood one and cut her own wood for it, because obviously she wouldn’t hear of a chainsaw. She grew her own vegetables, and for other supplies she either walked four miles to town and back, or somebody like Lila’s grandparents picked things up for her. Naturally there was no vacuum cleaner, and she did all her washing by hand and hung it out on a clothesline.
    She must have been very angry. Her father was careless with machinery, her mother didn’t love her enough to stay alive, and so, it appeared, June turned her own life ridiculously, fanatically over.
    She also raised goats, quite a different and more disagreeable matter than cattle, and when Lila and her grandmother reached June’s land, her grandmother scooted them through the gate, keeping a good grip on Lila’s hand and the picnic basket. “Now, don’t show fear,” she’d say. “They won’t bother you if you look bold and confident.” Which Lila considers one of the more useful lessons she learned from her grandmother, although it didn’t exactly work with the goats, which came racketing up, butting each other and sniffing and taking little runs at Lila and her grandmother, who kept saying things like “Keep moving now, we’ll be there in a minute,” and “Shoo,” and “Keep back, you nasty thing.”
    Past June’s rickety porch, and the screen door with its holes and dents, there were—what else?—more goats: lying in the kitchen; galumphing around the living room; resting on Aunt June’s bed, on top of beautiful, wrecked old quilts. There’d be a kid or two being bottle-fed, or a billy cleaning off Aunt June’s breakfast plate, because she just set dishes down on the floor to be licked. She said she and the goats didn’t have anything they couldn’t give each other; which is why Lila’s grandmother packed their lunch.
    Still,