Read On Agate Hill for Free Online

suddenly got to be an old, old man! I realize as I watch him. This scares me. In fact he looks like a man in a white shirt in a painting of a man in a white shirt walking across a green yard in the hot still part of the day, he has to stop from time to time to rest, it takes him forever to get there. And there is no one else in this picture at all no one present to help him, not Old Bess nor Virgil nor Liddy nor Rom, just nary a soul, as Virgil would say.
    All of a sudden I realize that I am not in this picture either.
    I am no where, a ghost girl.
    Uncle Junius goes to stand at the gate of the low picket fence surrounding the tenant house. He puts his hand on the latch and then they must see him for the door of the house opens up like Aunt Mittys coo coo clock from Germany and out they all come tumbling, tough little Godfrey mean as a snake and her two girls Victoria and Blanche, dont you think these are fancy names for the tenant farmers children? as Rachel pointed out.
    But Selena has got notions, in fact she is full to bursting with them.
    Selena is the tenant farmers wife.
    Now that would be Mister Vogell of German descent, but where is he? Up and vanished into thin air one hot day last summer while Selena and the rest of us were picking peaches and cutting them up and drying them out on the scaffold in the sun. Selena told Aunt Fannie that Mister Vogell went to the field and never came home, and has never been heard from since. He did not show a sign of leaving before he went, according to Selena. It is hard to imagine Mister Vogell doing a thing so out of the ordinary, for he was a thick glum man like a side of beef who never said anything at all. He had an extra big head like a melon with a straight shock of yellow hair that fell into his eyes and gave him a stupid appearance, like a window with the shade pulled down. He wore his pants hiked way up high to show his fat white ankles. He was considerable older than Selena.
    I just can not see why she ever married him, why she is an attractive woman, Fannie used to say, and Uncle Junius said, Now Fannie, we willnever know what kind of a situation she came from, nor what has happened to her along the way. And it is true that those two daughters look very different from Mister Vogell, being dark and curly headed like gypsy girls. Selena herself is dark complected and dark haired, a tall woman strong as an ox. She can work all day long in the field then split wood like a man, many is the time I have looked out my cubbyhole window here to see Selena out by the wood pile with her skirt hitched up and the ax upraised, and the ringing of the ax lasts all morning long. She is a good worker, and with those children, it is clear that Uncle Junius could never kick her out. It would not be in his nature. So Selena is still in the tenant house.
    But little by little since Aunt Fannie died, Selena has been worming her way into this house too. Now Uncle Junius has took to calling her the housekeeper though Liddy will not do hardly a thing Selena says and Old Bess pays her no mind at all.
    I look out my cubbyhole window.
    There stands Uncle Junius at the gate to the tenant house. There stands Uncle Junius bareheaded in the sun with his jacket folded over his arm. It is like he is under a spell. He stands there until Selena herself comes busting out of the open door with her black hair just washed and hanging down almost to her waist in waves like some animals shiny coat. She is bare foot wearing a loose white blouse and a red skirt, she has got a big smile on her big red mouth and her black eyes flash in the sun like the fools gold I keep in my pocket. Uncle Junius says something and Selena says something and throws back her head and laughs. Her hair falls all down her back. Then she opens the gate and goes to Uncle Junius and wraps her arms around him like a vine.
    Like poison ivy, is what I think.
    All I can see of Uncle Junius is the back of his head but Selena lifts her head all of a