The Sister

(center)THE SISTER(/center)
(center) fantasy based on “Out, Out –“ by Robert Frost) (/center)
(quote)"Don't let him cut my hand off -\The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!" (Frost) (/quote)

         As if a man knows what it is to do a day’s work! The young woman sniffed and banged the kettle of salted water and new potatoes on the hot cookstove.
“Man’s got a right to good supper when he gets up at dawn and does a day’s work,” the old potbelly declared. Just come in for a cup of water, he said, but he snapped his suspenders and hitched up his britches so the whole world would take note of his size. She didn’t respond. There was no need, he said something very like nearly every evening. He rumbled in the back of his throat and threw his last words over his shoulder, “Just don’t you go burnin’ them greens. Man’s got a right to his supper.”
And who is it gets up before dawn to make sure a man has his eggs and bacon and coffee and half the bread she spent the whole day before baking just so he can eat? she demanded of the air fragrant with frying chops, stewed and sugared greens and the salted water. Who cleans up the plates and cups and sweeps up his sloppiness and then has to start in replacing the bread he gorged and do the whole works again and again for noontime dinner and now supper? She pulled two autumn apple pies from the old oven.  The spicy richness of hot apples and cinnamon and just enough sugar to be sweet, but not decadent, pulled the corners of her thin mouth into a resigned smile. She set the pies on the open north window. A cool breeze washed the kitchen in the savory smells of autumn leaves and her day’s work.
As the potatoes began to dance in the boiling water, she wiped her hands on her apron. Time to call the men for supper, she knew. It would take them the rest of the potatoes’ cooking time to wash up. Like her mother, rest in peace, she would have no unwashed men at her table. She piled the chops glistening in their hot fat into one skillet to hold warm on the back of the cookstove top. The greens wouldn’t suffer from a few more minutes’ cooking. Her brother would say the extra stewing made the slimy things easier to swallow without having to taste them and so get on sooner to his pie. 
From the yard on the south side she heard the buzz saw chewing wood: growl and clatter and chomp its sharp-toothed way through firewood. She laughed aloud over the greens that swirled around her turning spoon. Her pot-bellied father hadn’t snapped but twice at her brother this day to watch out what the fool-headed dreamer was doing. Other days, her father would tell him, and anyone who could hear for five miles around, that some day the saw would catch the boy’s neck; and his head would go lop, lop, lop, lop, collecting saw dust and dirt all down the yard if the boy didn’t stop his dreaming.
The old potbelly was not wrong. She would allow as he was not wrong about the boy’s dreaming. But, Lord! The tales that boy could weave on the closed-in winter’s night, with their father snoring by the dying fire, and two blankets apiece to keep out the cold before bedtime and their downy featherbeds. Fairy-wing pictures he drew in crystalline words until she could almost believe, could just come to the edge of believing that there was still magic in their simple, battling way of life.
She moved out of smells of her kitchen. The breeze blew cooler outside the house and she missed her sweater. Sunset ran red over the mountains into the early evening’s gray. It would be featherbeds for all of them tonight. She listened to the laughs – loud, hopeful barks of men who smelled of dirt and sweat and wood resin and who wanted their supper. When she put foot down in sight of the sawing works, in sight of her brother, paired eyes like stars in a reddened sky would celebrate her with cheers and demands that she should have come earlier to pronounce the precious word: “Supper.”
In just that moment, there was no separating them: the “Damned fool!” shout and its like over her brother’s half-laugh, half-scream. The saw bit through an unexpected branch: so young a branch, the saw tore a leaf’s stem and it spurted red. Maple, she thought the leaf, or maybe elm with its five fingers splayed. Men’s bodies collided and shoved her roughly aside. At the snap of the door shut, she knew her brother had been carried away. He pierced the tenderness behind her eyes with his call.
They laid him, doctor and sawyers and all, in the bedroom. Not her room, a room strange to her until bedclothes wanted laundering. She turned away to watch the cold-dulled chops and splash some salted water on the flames heating the new potatoes. She did not smell pies now, only the sweet, sickly ether and things that should not be done. 
Places were set at table. She’d laid on plates and forks before the potbelly had his water. She pulled out her brother’s chair and traced her brother’s plate, Closest to the hearth, he sat by the fireside where his stories would rise
with the heat opposing a cold night. She missed her sweater again, but it lay too close to the hearth and she had no heart to move towards it. Heavy shoes fret the boards towards her and mouths poisoned with the news cannot tell her, but breath and heart are wrenched, as by a closed fist, from her breast all the same. His chair stops the fall and the last of her air escapes the grip, “My boy.”
         Bodies clear, move their unwantedness from her kitchen. The potbelly father is a specter by the bedroom door.
         And she has burned the greens.