THE VIEWING
The first time I laid eyes on the
stranger he was stretched out flat on his back in the sunshine on the edge of
my great Uncle Enoch’s sweet tater patch.
Dressed in a fancy Sunday-go-to-meeting
suit with his hands pulled up and across his chest, he looked an awful lot like
a dead man fixing to be tossed down into a burying hole, but I reckoned right
away he wasn’t. I came close, close enough to see his chest was rising and
falling so I knew he was breathing, slow and steady like a turtle taking a
stroll down the road, but he was breathing.
Seeing him sort of sudden like I did
came close to scaring the life plum out of me, so I whirled around and tore off
down the hill to the barn to get my Papa.
With my overalls’ strap loose and
flapping in the breeze, and my bare feet making a slapping noise against the
dirt path as I ran, I commenced to hollering long before I ever reached the old
barn.
“Papa! Papa! There’s a man stretched out
in the tater field behind the hog pen. You’ve gotta come.”
Papa didn’t answer, didn’t even so much
as peek his head out of the barn, so I called out to him again.
“Papa!
Papa, are you in there?”
I rounded the front of the barn. With
both my hands, and leaning all my weight against it, I cracked open one of the
old, weathered doors. The barn smell I was in love with smacked me in the face
as the door squeaked open. The odor of leather saddles, horse manure, and fresh
cut hay was a welcoming aroma to me and no matter how many hours a day I spent
inside, I never tired of being in the old barn.
“Papa, you need to come quick,” I said,
huffing and puffing and out of breath from the run. “There’s a stranger laid
out behind the hog pen.”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t even turn
or look my way. Matter of fact, I wasn’t sure at that moment he even believed
what I was saying, which would have hurt my feelings a bit if I hadn’t been
prone to lying.
We want to thank author Pauline Creeden for offering us her first page last week. I thought it was fun having a Steampunk page on our blog.
Stop by Pauline's website to learn more about her and this genre.
