The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

could lay her on top of the other boiled-over people they had stacked at one end of the barge like corded wood.
    My uncle said that after three days, when the only sun was just the amber light, the barge was full. The men in the green uniforms headed it back up the bayou, and even though sometimes they would see things hung up in the trees and caught along the fences they would not stop. The men in the green uniforms spread white powder out of green barrels on the people stacked under big green tarps. Men’s boats like my uncle’s were laid helter-skelter on the barge, all banged up like a lot of toys some bullies had come along and played too roughwith. All the men like my uncle who had the boats stood around the edges of the barge away from the big green tarps, away from their boats they could not look at, and as far away from each other as they could without falling over into the boiling water. They stood watching for faces of boiled-over people to come up to just below the surface like they sometimes did, like they just wanted to sneak a peek before slipping back under. Then the men stood looking away to the trees and to the fences along the bayou that caught the boiled-over people. They stood looking, giving good hard long looks, because they knew, like my uncle knew, that once they were back up the bayou home they would never be able to watch a stew pot boil, or look at something caught on barbed wire ever the same again, even with someone like me coming in to show it is nothing but a piece of nothing thrown up on the fence by the wind.

HAPPINESS OF THE GARDEN VARIETY
 
    I FELT REALLY BAD about what we ended up having to do to Vic’s horse Buster today, not that, looking back, all this could have been helped, all this starting when Steve Willis and I were ripping the old roof off of where we live in the shanty by the canal on Vic’s acres. Vic was up to Norfolk again, checking on a washing machine for his many-childed wife, Steve Willis and I left to rip off the roof and hammer in the new shingles. We were doing this in change for rent. Every month we do something in change for rent from Vic. Last month previous we strung three miles of pound net with bottom weights and cork toppers. What we change for rent usually comes to a lot more than what I’m sure the rent isfor our four-room front porch shanty on the canal out back of Vic’s, but Steve Willis and I like Vic and Vic lets us use his boat and truck for side business we do on new-moon nights.
    Let me tell you something about what makes what we ended up doing to Vic’s horse Buster all the worse. This is not to say about Vic less than Buster; me, I personally, and I know Steve Willis did too, hated Buster, Steve Willis having had to watch from far away Buster kill two of Vic’s dogs. There’d be a stomp and a kick of dust and then a splash in the canal where it’s a crab feast on old Tramp or Big Spot. Then there was Buster’s biting and kicking of us humans, Buster having bit me on my shoulder once coming up from behind while I was scraping barnacles from one of Vic’s skiffs in change for rent and then he didn’t even move when I came at him with a sharp-sided hoe. Steve Willis had Buster kick in the driver side of his car door after Buster had been into some weeds Vic had sprayed with the wrong powder. Buster kicked in the door so hard Steve Willis still has to crawl in from the other way. It was this eating that finally got Buster in the end, though not being able to read the right powder label is something about Vic which made him have us around.
    This is what I mean, this about Vic and about what we did to his horse to make things all the worse: Vic could not read nor write, and this about Vic affected the way we all were with him. What I mean all, meansVic’s wife and his children and Buster and his dogs and all the acres we all lived on down by the canal, and everything on all the acres, and everything on all those acres painted aquamarine