She had a great deal to do in the next few days, because she was going to have company. Dreams or not, tired or not, she had never been one to slight company and she didn't intend to start now. But she would have to go very slowly or she would get forgetting things - she forgot a lot these days - and misplacing things until she ended up chasing her own tail.
The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson's henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift.
"Blasphemy," she told herself complacently. "The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs."
When her few dishes were washed, she put on her heavy shoes and took her cane. Even now she rarely used the cane, but today she would need it. Four miles going, four miles coming back. At sixteen she could have dashed one way and trotted the other, but sixteen was far behind her now.
She set off at eight o'clock in the morning, hoping to reach the Richardson farm by noon and sleep through the hottest part of the day. In the late afternoon she would kill her chickens and then come home in the gloaming. She wouldn't arrive until after dark, and that made her think of her dream of the night before, but that man was still far away. Her company was much closer.
She walked very slowly, even more slowly than she felt she had to, because even at eight-thirty the sun was fat and powerful. She didn't sweat much - there wasn't enough excess flesh on her bones to wring the sweat out of - but by the time she'd reached the Goodells' mailbox, she had to rest a bit. She sat in the shade of their pepper tree and ate a few fig bars. Not an eagle or a taxicab in sight, either. She cackled a little at that, got up, brushed the crumbs off her dress, and went on. Nope, no taxicabs. The Lord helped those that helped themselves. All the same, she could feel all of her joints tuning up; tonight there would be a concert.
She hunched more and more over her cane as she went, even though her wrists began to be a misery to her. Her brogans with the yellow rawhide lacings shuffled in the dust. The sun beat down on her, and as the time passed, her shadow got shorter and shorter. She saw more wild animals that morning than she had seen since the twenties: fox, coon, porcupine, fisher. Crows were everywhere, squalling and cawing and circling in the sky. If she had been around to hear Stu Redman and Glen Bateman discussing the capricious - it had seemed capricious to them, anyhow - way the superflu had taken some animals while leaving others alone, she would have laughed. It had taken the domestic animals and left the wild ones alone, it was as simple as that. A few species of domestics had been spared, but as a general rule, the plague had taken man and man's best friends. It had taken the dogs but left the wolves, because the wolves were wild and the dogs weren't.
A red-hot sparkplug of pain had settled deep into each of her hips, behind each knee, in her ankles, in the wrists she was using to support herself on the cane. She walked and she talked to her God, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud, unaware of any difference between the two. And she fell to thinking about her own past again. 1902 had been the best year, all right. After that it seemed that time sped up, the pages of some big fat calendar ruffling over and over, hardly ever pausing. A body's life went by so fast... how was it a body could get so tired of living it?
She'd had five children by Davy Trotts; one of them, Maybelle, had choked to death on a piece of apple in the back yard of the Old Place. Abby had been hanging clothes and she had turned around to see the baby lying on her back, clawing at her throat and turning purple. She had gotten the chunk of apple out at last, but by then little Maybelle had been still and cold, the only girl she had ever borne and the only one of her many children to die an accidental death.
Now she sat in the shade of an elm just inside the Nauglers' fence, and two hundred yards up the road she could see where dirt gave way to tar - this was the place where Freemantle Road became Polk County Road. The heat of the day made a shimmer over the tar, and at the horizon was quicksilver, shining like water in a dream. On a hot day you always saw that quicksilver just at the end of where your eye could see, but you never quite caught up to it. Or at least she never had...