The Freedom in American Songs Read Online Free PDF Page A

powder?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œSallysuckers, we called them, when we were young. We didn’t put them in any soup though. We ate them out of our hands. Hungry, we’d devour anything. We were never in the house in those days, even when we were older, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Even for awhile after we all got married. I don’t know what happened to us.”
    â€œYou and Mary and Margaret?”
    â€œOutdoors all the time, yes. Myself and Mary and Marg. With our bamboo fishing poles. We’d go to Spur Cove Pond and we’d get the biggest kind of trout. One summer Mary and Marg were both pregnant. I used to have to climb up in the trees to fetch their hooks. We were different then. We’re all big now. Skinny? How skinny were we, especially Mary, and you know how big she is now. I brought a baking powder cake one day, a great big one, and Mary sat by the pond and ate that whole cake. I didn’t want any. But she could eat the works. My what a laugh we’d have then, the three of us in at that pond, with me crawling around up in the trees.”
    Mrs. Halloran took herself back so easily to happier times that in a minute she was no longer depressed but laughing like a girl. Marianne wanted to hug her. Someone had always looked after her. Now she had no one, and she was getting old, and she wasn’t used to it. She needed someone she could depend on, and Marianne knew she was not the right person, and felt inadequate. But Mrs. Halloran seemed to consider Marianne sufficient as a friend all the same, and she trusted her. The sea was sucking the beach; Marianne could see it out Mrs. Halloran’s new white window with the twelve small panes. Maybe the sea was the insatiable beast responsible for all the wallpaper and floor canvas and sparkly stucco ceilings. But you couldn’t even blame the sea, really, thought Marianne. What hunger made the sea need to suck? Greed wasn’t a thing that had a human origin. Hunger and need were in the air. The bees would gorge sweetness out of the red and white clover until their bellies distended. Everything urged its need, need, need, like the song of the wedding-bird in spring. The secret, Marianne wondered, the secret had something to do with not fearing the need. Because the fear was, you wouldn’t be able to feed the need, and because you did not have food for it, it would devour you.
    â€œFeed the need, feed the need, feed the need, don’t fear it,” Marianne could hear the wedding-bird singing. And she thought of Mrs. Ruby down the road, and knew Mrs. Ruby fed everything that asked her to, and always had enough, and put new paint and paper on her walls once a year in time for Christmas, no fooling around, and that need was fed and that was the end of it. Marianne wondered what was the difference between Mrs. Ruby and Mrs. Halloran, because she knew Mrs. Ruby was fearless though Walter Ruby had died, and Mrs. Halloran had always been afraid, even before Leonard had died. There were the rooms, and the wallpaper, and the sea, sucking and needing, and beyond that were storms and piles of clouds and the sun and moon. Mrs. Ruby had told Marianne she admired how smart God must be to know exactly when to send down the first snow every year, and from the way she said it, Marianne could see Mrs. Ruby imagined God’s snow all stockpiled in a special area up among certain clouds in the highest parts of the sky. God. Maybe Mrs. Ruby had made a bargain with God. I’ll feed everything that comes here hungry, God, and you make sure there’s enough. I won’t worry if you send the supplies. Maybe the need had grown so insistent that Mrs. Ruby had made that bargain, since she could meet the need in no other way. And maybe Mrs. Halloran still thought she had to meet the need personally herself, out of storehouses of food and supplies that she knew she did not possess. Marianne wished she could tell Mrs. Halloran to lay all her