Read Yonnondio: From the Thirties for Free Online Page B

truck horse bargainedfor and promised. And sometimes clearing the coal, walking to work in the morning
     darkness, scrubbing his face, Jim stops suddenly, and thickly, out of his throat,
     utters, “April.” And Anna’s hand goes often over her heart, remembering new life words
     of hope spoken against the weave of a child’s delirious derisive laughter.
     
    April at last. Delicate with shy greens and little winds blowing. A few of the women
     come to bid goodbye. And when Anna closes the door for the last time, quick, hard,
     dropping her hand from the latch, they watch as if it were a ceremony. Wistfulness
     is in their eyes, no envy. “Goodbye. Goodbye,” they chorus. But the Holbrooks do not
     look back, only Mazie once, but there is nothing left, only a shadow of culm, rearing
     against the sky. Over it small white clouds forming and dissolving—almost fairy hands,
     waving goodbye, goodbye.

THREE
    Three days they jolted through Wyoming and west Nebraska. The black cuts of the buttes
     against the sky, the colors in them like striped fire, the great quiet desolation
     of the mesa they passed, filled Mazie with some strange unhappiness, more like happiness
     than anything she had ever known. Anna felt like a bride; riding along, she sang and
     sang. Sometimes Jim whistled or sang with her in a depthless bass voice. And the wagon
     made gay silvery sounds accompanying them, and the sun laid warm hands on their backs.
    The fourth day they came to South Dakota—breaths caught in sharp wonder at the green
     stretching for miles, at the small streamlets like open silver veins on the ground,
     and here and there dots of cattle grazing, heads down. The air was pure and soft like
     a baby’s skin. “Breathe,” Anna said, “breathe it in, kids.” “Listen, Momma, there’s
     birds.” Birds, floating round shiningbubbles of song on the air, jackrabbits rising suddenly from one end of the road to
     flee to the other.
    And that day there was laughter. Nellie, refusing to trot, stopping stubbornly, haunches
     apart, head lifted up. In vain Jim beat her. When he clambered down to lead her; she
     galumphed away at a tremendous (for her) speed. Though Anna, frantic, tried to reach
     to dragging reins, the children screamed and laughed. Crazy, the wagon tipped, this
     side, that side. “Seesaw, Marjorie Daw,” Will began. And Nellie, with immense dignity,
     stopped.
    Five minutes later Jim came puffing up. A farmer stopped his plowing to lean over
     the fence. “Ya oughta get a mule, I reckon. They’re not so stubborn.”
    “She is a mule in disguise.” Jim climbed up again. But again she wouldn’t budge. Leisurely
     she cropped the grass at her side.
    “How about the old grass-on-the-end-of-a-stick gag?” the farmer asked. “That’ll start
     her trottin.”
    It did. Jim, with one foot on the step, felt the wagon jerk forward and barely swung
     himself up in time. Nellie didn’t wait to go for the food that hung tantalizingly
     beyond her nose. For two hours she ran, Jim precariously directing her with the reins
     over corners. Mazie stood up, her hands on the wagon seat, screaming with delight.
     The wind came over herbody with a great rush of freedom; freedom and joy tingled to her hair roots. Anna
     swayed back and forth, clutching her hat and the baby, laughing too. Ridiculous Nellie
     with her huge buttocks moving in frenzied rhythm, the wagon bumping along after, and
     the wheels making their singy laughter. Laughter came from the skies, blowing something
     that was more than coal dust out of their hearts.
    The sky tinged leaden. Enormous shadows began to shift over the face of the prairie,
     and above the whole sky came gray, with dull silver undersides to the clouds. Cold,
     the wind whirled from the north. Nellie set her head stubbornly against it, plodding
     along. Jim stopped to stretch the canopy over them, telling the children to scurry
     into their coats.
    The wind began running a long hand under