Read One Bright Morning for Free Online Page B

happily toddled out of the door,
holding onto Sadie’s hand.
    “ I go wi’ Say,” Annie
announced to her mama with a big, nearly toothless
smile.
    “ Well, you don’t have to
look so danged happy about it,” her mama told her with feigned
sternness.
    In truth, she hated like the devil to see
her baby go away, even for a couple of days. Annie was all Maggie
had in the world, and she couldn’t bear to be parted from her.
    “ She’ll be just fine,
Maggie. You know she loves to play with the twins.” Sadie and Pig
Phillips had two little boys just six months older than
Annie.
    “ I know she will be,” said
Maggie, and that didn’t make her feel very good, either.
    Annie would probably be better off if Sadie
kept her forever, she thought grumpily to herself. At least the
Phillipses had a profitable pig farm and each other. All Annie had
here was her.
    She sighed with weariness when she bade
Sadie and Annie good-bye at the door. Then she realized she hadn’t
heard the steady chop-chop-chop of wood from the rear of the house
for a while now, and stepped around back to see what Ozzie was up
to.
    He was up to a nap, as usual, and Maggie’s
nerves twanged sharply and finally snapped. She picked up a large
chunk of wood and hurled it at the man snoring next to the wood
block. The heavy chunk hit Ozzie square in the small of his back
and Maggie smiled in satisfaction.
    Ozzie sat up with a bellow of rage and pain
and thunked his head on the ax handle, which was sticking out at
right angles to the blade that he had embedded in the block before
he laid himself down to snooze. One hand rubbed his head while the
other rubbed his back and he looked over at Maggie with a terribly
hurt expression on his wrinkled pink face.
    “ Either you finish chopping
that wood by four o’clock this afternoon, Ozzie Plumb, or you get
the hell off of my place right now,” said Maggie with venom
dripping from her tongue. “For God’s sake Ozzie, I need you more
now than ever. I got me a gunshot man to tend in the house, and I
can’t be always after you to do the work I pay you to do. And don’t
forget, you miserable son of a sow, that I still have your damned
guitar in the house.”
    She whirled around to stomp back to the
house before Ozzie could do more than flap his mouth.
    Ozzie wasn’t a quick thinker even when he
was awake or he might have mentioned the fact that Maggie didn’t
own a clock. Instead, he glared at Maggie’s back for several
seconds, all the emotions common to weak men crossing his face,
from anger to a craving for revenge, to perplexity. His expression
finally settled into a glower of long-suffering abuse when he
hauled himself up onto his two hind legs and resumed chopping
wood.
    The aroma of fresh-cut pine followed Maggie
to the house. It was one she liked a lot, and it mingled nicely
with the fragrant wood smoke that billowed out of the chimney. She
paused at the door to look about her, and the scene that met her
eyes was one of deceptive peace and beauty. In fact, Maggie
thought, if she weren’t so blamed exhausted, she might even enjoy
it.
    Even now, during the tag-end of a hard
winter, the woods were beautiful. Piñons and mesquite lined the
clearing in which Kenny had built their home, and the front of the
house afforded Maggie a grand view of the meadow where Kenny had
planted his corn. Maggie couldn’t keep up the field alone, so it
was reverting as fast as it could to meadowland.
    A little branch of the Hondo River ran
beside the house, so water was easy to come by. Water was the only
thing easy to come by around here. The stream was so insignificant
that nobody had bothered to name it yet, but Maggie always thought
of it as Bright’s Creek. She thought of Kenny every time she
fetched water from it. Building the house near the stream was the
smartest thing Kenny had ever done, most likely.
    The house itself could more appropriately be
termed a cabin, since it was put together out of thick