We Were the Mulvaneys Read Online Free PDF Page A

the upper drive. Dad’s voice yelling, “Who’s out there?” And the dogs barking.
    But no. I waited, and nothing happened.
    It’s like I was invisible.
    The house looked larger now in night than it did in day. A solid looming mass confused with the big oaks around it, immense as a mountain. The barns too were dark, heavy, hulking except where moonlight rippled over their tin roofs with a look like water because of the cloud shreds blowing through the sky. No horizon, solid dark dense-wooded ridges like the rim of a deep bowl, and me in the center of the bowl. The mountains were only visible by day. The tree lines. By night our white-painted fences gleamed faintly like something seen underwater but the unpainted fences and the barbed wire fences were invisible. In the barnyard, the humped haystack, the manure pile, I wouldn’t have been able to identify if I didn’t know what they were. Glazed-brick silo shining with moonlight. Barns, chicken coop, the sheds for the storage of machinery, much of it old, broken-down and rusted machinery, the garage, carports—silent and mysterious in the night. On the far side of the driveway the orchard, mostly Winesap apples, massed in the dark and the leaves quavering with wind and it came to me maybe I’m dead? a ghost? maybe I’m not here, at all?
    But I didn’t turn back, kept on, following the deer, now passing the strawberry patch (my sister Marianne had taken over, since I’d done only a mediocre job fertilizing, weeding the summer before) and there was Mom’s garden we all helped her with, anyway Patrick, Marianne and me, sweet corn, butternut squash, a half dozen pumpkins still remaining, and marigolds beginning to fade, for we’d had a frost or two already. That look as Mom characterized it of an autumn garden—“So melancholy, you want to cry.” Along the fence, the sunflowers crowding one another, most of them beginning to droop, going ragged, heads bowed, swaying in the wind like drunken figures. Birds had pecked out most of the seeds and the flowers were left torn and blind-looking yet still it was strange to me to pass by them—sunflowers seem like people!
    I was following the deer though I couldn’t see them. The earth was puddled and the puddles glittered like mirrors. Smells are sharper by night—I smelled a rich mud-smell, wet-rotted leaves and manure. I wasn’t much aware of my feet, cold now, and going numb, so if they were being scratched, cut by stones or spiky thorns, I didn’t know. I was scared, but happy! Not-Judd, now. Not-known.
    I crept up to the pond, which was only about three feet deep at this end. Draining out of the meandering brook that connected with Alder Creek. Every few years the pond choked up with sediment, tree debris and animal droppings, and Dad had to dredge it out with a borrowed bulldozer.
    A single doe was drinking at the pond! I crouched in the grasses, watching from about fifteen feet away. I could see her long slender neck outstretched. Her muzzle, lowered to the water. By moonlight the doe was drained of color and on the pond’s surface light moved in agitated ripples from where she drank. Where were the other deer? It was unusual to see only one. They must have continued on, into the woods. The doe lingered, lifting her head alert and poised for flight. Her ears twitched—did she hear me? Maybe she could smell me. Her eyes were like a horse’s eyes, protuberant and shiny, black. Tension quivered in her slender legs.
    I loved the wild creatures. I could never hunt them. They had no names the way the animals of High Point Farm had names. You could not call them, nor identify them. As soon as you sighted them, by day, they would vanish. As if to refute the very authority of your eyes. Theirs was the power to appear and to disappear. It was meant to be so: not as in Genesis, where Adam names the creatures of the earth, sea, and is granted