Summer was thick upon the Thursby house. Spanish moss dripped motionless from the ponderous live oak by the porch, in whose shade sat a lone man in a rocking chair. His face was as creased as the bark of the tree, and he was quiet.
It was always this way by mid summer in Velusia. The town was enveloped in the July heat like an ant in amber. They say that after God finished laying out the Fifty States, he went back to smooth them over some. Alaska and its kin gave him no end of trouble, and the Carolinas and Virginias had some stubborn creases that wouldn't lay right. He got so all-fired frustrated with Tennessee and parts of Georgia that he went and heated up his iron again--stuck in right up next to the fire and let it set. It got red-hot and he came back. But he couldn't figure where to begin, the whole mess of 'em were so puckered and hillocked. While he was figuring, he done set that iron right flat on Florida and its been hot and steamy ever since.
His heels and the rocker, the infrequent red-throated flair of a basking lizard from the leaves of the camilla bush, the far-off gurgling of the head spring - for Walter, time hung in the air as a dusty haze. In the porch shade he sat and rocked and looked out on the yard, its sandy stretches tremulous with heat and waves of memory.
The freeze of 1895.
the manatee chasing of his childhood.
traveling to Ocala.
the new general store and Uncle Tyler's automobile.
"I've been beginning things all my life."
1 comment:
Great sense of character and place, and the connection of the two.
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