O Charity! Every frozen morning for awhile in early winter you had a thin little winter moon slung like a slice of a silver Rocky Ford cantaloupe over the sawmill; and then I would go out to the well in the yard and snap off the silver thorns of ice from the pump muzzle and jack up the morning water and stand and look over across the fairy fields at you where you lay like a storybook town, and know that on all the little wooden roofs of houses there was a delicate trail of lacelike rime on the shingles. Then all the chickens and guineas of Charity would be crowing and calling and all the cattle lowing, and the Charity dogs barking (all with a sound that china animals might make if they could crow or call or low), and in that crystal and moonhaunted moment I would stand dazzling in the first sunray of morning, and wonder what would ever happen, to us all. And on a spring Saturday you would be sitting there in your place in Texas “grinnin like a Chessy Cat” as Aunty said, so happy and hopping with all the people come in from the fields and farms to handle you and claim you and gather round in you—there was Glee Ramey and there was Sweet Climpkins and Sing Stovall and Ola Stokes, the music teacher (“One day a little bubble will break in your throat, honey, and then you’ll have a beautiful voice.
What do You think about The House Of Breath (1949)?
