She felt the annoyance rise up within her. "Pa, how could you forget. We don't have a blame thing to eat in the house!"
"I just forgot. Sugarplum," he answered. "You know how it is with me, I get to playing and I forget what time it is, I forget about eating and sleeping and purt near everything."
"Didn't Adelaide or Agrippa remind you?"
"Ain't seen neither since early this morning. Right after you left, that Hightower boy showed up, and they went running out to have a picnic with him."
"A picnic!" Esme's voice was incredulous. "Well, I sure hope he brought the food."
"Nope," Pa said shortly. "They both were carrying a basket of vittles."
Esme's spark of vexation quickly flamed into a full-fledged anger.
"Well, sure to graces, I bet there is not so much as cornmeal dust left in the house. How am I supposed to feed this family anyway!"
Her father had the decency to look embarrassed and hastily rose to his feet. "I'm sorry, Esme-girl," he told her cajolingly. "I'll head down to the river right now."
Esme sighed in exasperation and shook her head. "Pa, it's late afternoon. It'd be dark afore you even got to the river."
Her father glanced up, surprised to notice the sun had nearly disappeared behind the mountain.
"You're surely right, Esme. Lord, girl—where you been all day?"
A flush of embarrassment stained her cheeks. She should have come straight back home and gone to work. Instead she'd wanted to hold those moments in the store more closely, to think about them, to inspect them, and she had spent the afternoon wandering along the river, daydreaming about Cleavis Rhy and the way he had looked at her.
"I went to town, Pa. I told you that."
"That don't take all day," her father said. "And you didn't bring nothing back. That young Rhy wouldn't give you nothing? He was always fairly generous to me."
Esme's chin came up defiantly. "I will not stoop to begging."
Yohan shook his head slightly in disbelief. "Accepting Christian charity ain't begging," he told her. "Believe me, Esme, it makes those folks feel downright warm inside to be able to help those less fortunate, like ourselves."
"Well, it don't make me feel 'downright warm inside.' It makes me feel downright queasy!"
Her father nodded. "I know. Your ma was the same way. She hated taking anything from anybody. Why, that woman worked herself down to a nub. Always thinking about what we were gonna eat and where we were gonna live."
"Well, somebody's got to worry about those things!"
Yo seated himself back on the ground, leaning against the rough wood of the house, and drew his bow sweetly across the strings of the fiddle.
"You've got the right of it there, and I cain't deny it," he admitted. "But sometimes it appears to me that you've been considering the practical too much. You're neglecting to live and breathe. Feel that breeze stirring, Esme-girl? You can almost smell spring in the air. Spring's a-coming. Flowers gonna bloom, birds is gonna sing. And plenty of young gals like yourself is gonna to be falling in love. That's what you ought to be considering."
Esme jerked the front door open with disgust. "I think a gal would be a good deal more likely to fall in love when she's got a full belly and a pantry full of food put by for the winter. Now, if you don't stop talking that nonsense and let me get to my work, I'm going to break that dang fiddle over your head!"
Yo chuckled slightly at the idle threat. "Just like her ma," he whispered to himself. A wave of sadness crossed his face. Putting the fiddle to his chin, he returned to his music, filling up the growing shadows with beautiful sounds, sounds of spring and romance.
Cleavis flipped openhis gold watch and checked the time. "Six o'clock, precisely," he said to himself, smiling. Slipping the fancy timepiece back into the watch pocket of his trousers, he picked the sign up from under the counter and went to hang it on the door.
It read, CLOSED. ASK AT THE HOUSE. It was not a good sign. His father had painted it, and the big block letters were formed like those of a child and all the e's were upside-down. It didn't matter, however. Very few people on the mountain would actually bother to read it. And every living soul in and around Vader knew that if Cleav wasn't at the store, they should ask at the house.
After grabbing up his thick wool coat from the hook and dousing the light from the one coal-oil lamp, Cleav headed for home.
He took a circuitous route, walking along the ridges of the numerous small ponds that he'd dug in the marshy bottom land between the store and the river. The fish swimming in those pools were his true work, or at least he liked to think so. Storekeeping might be his vocation, but natural science was his avocation.
Darkness precluded any investigation this evening, but he already knew what was going on beneath the surface of each still, small pool. He smiled to himself, thinking of the gentle silence of the water and the scores of trout eggs to be harvested next fall. Someday he hoped his work with trout would be known to fish culturists worldwide. Perhaps in the distant future a new species might carry his name. The Nolichucky Rhy Trout, he postulated. The idea brought a whistle to his lips.
When he approached the house, he noticed a lamp was lit in the parlor. Clearly it meant guests for dinner, and he hurried his walk. Taking the porch steps two at a time, he saw a young woman's head inside the parlor window, her crowning glory neatly twisted into a topknot of flaming red.
