I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories

Начало книги

WHEN THE TAXICAB let old man Meecham out in the dusty roadbed by his mailbox the first thing he noticed was that someone was living in his house. There was a woman hanging out wash on the clothesline and a young girl sunning herself in a rickety lawn chair and an old dust-colored Plymouth with a flat tire parked in Meecham’s driveway. All this so disoriented the old man that he dropped the cardboard suitcase he was holding and forgot about paying the cab driver. He thought for a dizzy moment that he had directed the driver to the wrong place: but there was the fading clapboard house and the warm umber roof of the barn bisected by the slope of ridge and on top of that the name ABNER MEECHAM on the mailbox in his own halting brushstrokes.

Looks like you got company, the cab driver said.

Beyond the white corner of the house the woman stood holding a bedsheet up to the line and she was studying him transfixed with a clothespin in her mouth. She seemed frozen to the ground, motionless as statuary a sculptor in a whimsical mood might have wrought of a sharecropper’s wife.

Читать дальше →