The Freedom in American Songs Read Online Free PDF

troubles at God’s feet, but of course she could not do that, because in her own soul the great maw of the sea, the open beak of the wedding-bird, and her own empty womb were crying, “Need, need, need,” with a din and a clatter that Marianne couldn’t quiet down long enough to get a message through to the one with whom all things were possible for those who believed. The most she could do was invite Mrs. Halloran to come to mass with her. She did not normally go to mass herself, and was not even Roman Catholic, but liked to sit under the great rose window and let the green saints and their lambs and lilies descend in a sunbeam and float across the skin of her arms, and she liked the hum and drone of the women of the cove saying their rosary like bees among the cove’s roses.
    â€œNo, I won’t go today.” Mrs. Halloran held up a strip of dripping orangeblossom paper. “I’ve got to get this one wall finished. You should bring me a bulletin. Jody always forgets to bring me one.”
    The bulletin was green. It had the bingo times on it. When Marianne brought it to Mrs. Halloran she found Laura and Jody and Mrs. Halloran arguing how to measure carpet for the pantry floor. The carpet was thick and dusty—someone had given them it. She had to step over rolls of it piled in the kitchen. The pantry floor was cold, since they had ripped its canvas off. Mrs. Halloran thanked Marianne for the bulletin. Before Marianne left she saw that a green bulletin lay on top of the television in the living room, because this time Jody had remembered to bring one home. It was like that with everything Marianne tried to do to help. She was not needed, not really, not in any way that might last.
    The next morning a horrendous clattering woke her before 7:30. She looked out her bedroom window and saw a man riding some sort of tractor over Mrs. Halloran’s meadow, slicing lengths of sod off it, and in some mysterious way rolling as it sliced, so the entire meadow was stripped and littered with what looked like the cakes Marianne’s mother used to call Swiss rolls. But they were not made of sponge cake and jam, but of the beautiful grass of the field, and the man, Junior Etcheverry, had a helper hoisting them onto a flatbed truck to be taken to some housing development that was probably not far from where Leonard Halloran had suffered his heart attack.
    Now Mrs. Halloran could pay, Marianne remembered, for Jody’s snowsuit. Or could she? There were so many things Mrs. Halloran wanted. Maybe the sods would metamorphose into a big new TV, or an exercise bike, or a microwave for Jody to heat up Pizza Pockets after school. There was Mrs. Halloran now, waving up at Marianne’s window, lifting four triumphant fingers and shouting something. Marianne opened her window.
    â€œFour hundred dollars!” Marianne barely heard this over the racket of Junior’s sod cutter. “I’ll be able to rip down all that old wallpaper and put in brand new wallboard!”
    There was something unbearable, Marianne felt, about bartering the earth’s green coverlet for boards to line Mrs. Halloran’s Christmas room. Yet she knew Mrs. Halloran might never again have to worry about layers of wallpaper that peeled and deteriorated, or grew out of fashion, or reminded her of the years when her husband had called all the shots, and what was wrong with that? Marianne wished she could flee in her bathrobe across the road to Mary’s or Margaret’s house, to get them on the meadow’s side, to fight for the outdoors they’d loved before they married and had children and changed the wallpaper over and over again to make up for the purple daisies, red clover, buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace on which they had turned their backs, but would they know what she was on about?
    Marianne had not lived her whole life in the cove as they had done. She had not galloped to school with them on a horse,