The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Read Online Free PDF

until the cow groaned for milking or the hired man banged and swore on the outside gate. If nothing else intervened they’d stop only out of sheer exhaustion. Then they would look at each other oddly, questingly, as though the other person were a complete stranger, and gradually resume their normal treatment of one another, which was offhand and distracted, but with the assurance of people who thought alike. Even when they fought, it was with impatient dispatch. They were eager to get to the exciting part of the fight where they lost their tempers and approached each other with a frisson of rage that turned sexual, so that they could be slightly cruel and then surrender themselves to tenderness.

    He arranged her against the wall, held her chin in one cupped hand and drew his other hand slowly up beneath her skirt until she gasped, pretended to open herself to him. Just as he unbuckled his pants to enter her, though, she shoved him off balance, ducked from under his arm, and ran out the door laughing at his awkward hops and shouts. She slowed and picked her way along the ruts of the muddy road, breathing in anticipation of their night. Their night in which she would not refuse him. The huge canopy sky threatened gray-blue in the northwest, but the weather was far away and the wind desultory, the air watery, clear, the buds split in a faint green haze. The first of her tulips were pink at the green lips, ready to bloom. Under the tough grama and side oats, the new shoots of grass were strengthening and gathering their power. She thought of Berndt’s head tossed back, the cords running taut from the corner of his jaw. The way he nearly wept as he threw his famished weight into her again and again, and the way he glanced sideways, hungrily, after, until they began once again. Her need to touch him moved through her like a wave and she stopped, distractedly, passed a hand over her face, almost put her errand off, but then moved on.

    The bank was a solid square of Nebraska limestone, great windowed with deep blond sills and brass handles on the doors. The high ceiling was of ornate, white, pressed tin set off by thick crown moldings and a center medallion of sheaves of wheat. In the summer great fans turned the sluggish air, and the velvet-roped lanes and spittoons, the pink and gray mica-flecked granite countertops, and the teller’s cages seemed caught in a dim hush of order while outside the noise of the town continued, erratic. The relationship between the getting of money, a scrabbling and disorderly business, contrasted with the storing of money, an enterprise based on the satisfactory premise that human effort, struggle, even time itself, could be quantified, counted, stacked neatly away in a safe.
    Outside, on the day Miss DeWitt walked swiftly into town, the streets seemed unusually quiet and orderly. Even the bum sleeping against the side of the young elm had his arms neatly folded, and the one automobile parked, idling, was an elegant car of the sort—well, yes—she thought, oddly, that a bishop would use. Sure enough who but a priest should remove himself from the back seat kicking to the side his black soutane. With a meek and tentative squint at the bank, through tiny rimless eyeglasses, he made his way up the walk and steps. On the way, he bowed to Miss DeWitt, who followed him respectfully. As they walked together up the roped path in the lobby she said to him, loudly and clearly, in an amused tone of voice, “Sir, why this pretense? You are not a priest!”
    Whereupon the stooped old man straightened, magically broadened, and waved a hand across his face very much as she herself had, in the road, to erase her thoughts. Only he erased his character. He removed his glasses and from beneath his robe drew a snub-nosed pistol, which he pointed straight at Miss DeWitt’s forehead.
    “Righto,” he said.
    There was no other perceptible signal, but all of a sudden another male customer held a gun out as well,