Aly's House

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Book: Read Aly's House for Free Online
Authors: Leila Meacham
May, and the corn was high and beginning to tassel, a month away from picking time. It grew right up to the cyclone fence that ran around the Waynes’ front yard, an area of sparse grass long discouraged by the shade of two giant pecan trees.
    While Willy went inside with the laundry basket, she had stayed in the car and inspected with interest the place where Marshall lived. She decided the name of the farm came from cedars planted as windbreakers along the periphery of the knoll where the house stood. The farmhouse, a clapboard frame, was old, she knew. Her history book had described the style as coming to rural America in the early 1900s. She had visited similar houses and knew that the porch that skirted three sides was screened in the back for a summer parlor. This one featured the usual porch swing as well as a hospitable-looking table placed between two flat-armed porch chairs and pots of pretty red geraniums lining the broad steps. Twin chimneys faced each other from the left and right ends of the house; and in the center, a long, wide hall divided the bedrooms and bath on one side from the front parlor, dining room, and kitchen on the other. It was called a breezeway and served as exactly that in the summer months when the front door with its long oval pane of glass remained open so the air could circulate freely through the center of the structure. The house could have used a new roof and a fresh coat of yellow paint, but unlike most of its kind, whose porches sagged with clutter, and chickens scratched among rusting cans and farm equipment in the yard, the Wayne property had a tidy, well-cared-for look—like Marshall’s patched jeans and worn shoes.
    “Poor dirt farmers,” the Waynes were called by people like her family, and Aly sensed that Marshall minded. She perceived very early that it was pride, not conceit, that kept him aloof, his head held high and dark eyes brooding.
    That afternoon while Willy was still inside, the bus from the elementary school drove up at the end of the lane and deposited Marshall. Aly responded to her friends, who had spotted the Cadillac and were hollering and waving from the windows as if they hadn’t seen her for a week. She would have spoken to Marshall, if he’d given her so much as a glance. But he had walked past the car without turning his head and gone into the house as if she and the Cadillac were invisible.
    “Why don’t you offer a ride to young Marshall next Thursday, since we’re coming out to his place anyway?” Willy suggested on their way home. “He’d probably prefer the Caddy to the bus.”
    “Somehow I don’t think you’re right about that, Willy, but I’ll ask.”
    The next day on the playground, Marshall looked through her as if she’d been a screen door and said, “No thanks.”
    “Willy,” she asked not long afterward, “why don’t the Waynes cotton to us Kingstons?”
    “Well, now, Punkin, there’s an old saying that borrowing is not much better than beggin’, and the Waynes have been borrowing from your dad for a long time. Just as they’re about to get a nickel ahead, somethin’ comes along—like drought or inflation or a gas shortage—that costs a dime. It bothers Sy awfully that he’s not his own man and that his wife has to take in ironing, not that Elizabeth seems to mind.”
    “It bothers Marshall, too.”
    “Oh, does it ever. He takes poverty personally, that one does, and he’s straining at the bit to do something about it. Give him time and he will, too.”
    That summer she continued to accompany Willy on “laundry day,” happy to sit in the back of the Cadillac with the windows rolled down, absorbing the sights and smells and sounds of the country, feeling the constant tightness between her shoulder blades melt away. Sometimes they didn’t get out to the farm until twilight, a time when she would generally be rewarded with the sight of Marshall—or at least the top of his dark head—leading the cows through the

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