Breeze did run, but he soon came running back, for Old Breeze wasn’t there. His ax lay almost in the water, with its handle wet, and his throwing-wedge beside it.
The two old oxen were chewing their cuds, but the ground around the tree was all dug up and broken, as if hogs had rooted it up to find worms.
Breeze had called, and called, but nobody answered! When the mother heard that, a shiver went clear through her body. Her hands shook so when she lifted them out of the washtub that all the soap-suds on them trembled.
She said she’d go and call. She knew how to send her voice far away. She could make him hear and answer. Maybe a deer or a fox or a wildcat had come and tricked him away from his work, but her words quivered in her mouth as she said them.
All the children went trailing after her; Sis went hurrying with baby Sonny in her arms; and they all stood still and listened while the mother’s throat sent long thin whoopees away up into the sky. Her breast heaved with hoisting them so far above the trees into the far-away distance. She’d wait for an answer until all the echoes had whooped back, then she’d take a deep breath and cry out again.
An old crow laughed as he passed overhead, an owl who-whooed far in the distance. The wind began moaning and crying in the tops of all the other trees around the fallen pine.
The mother dropped on her knees and laid her forehead down on the earth. Her thin body shook, and her fingers twisted in and out as her hands wrung each other almost to breaking. She prayed and moaned and begged Jesus to call Granddad to come back. To come on in a hurry. She couldn’t stand for him not to answer when she called so hard and so long.
All the children began crying with her. Even Sis, who never cried no matter what happened, put Sonny down on the naked ground and with tears running out of her eyes all over her face, reached out and took the mother’s shoulders in both arms. She tried to keep them from shaking, but she soon shook with them, for the mother said over and over she had known all the time that something bad was going to happen. She knew it last night when she came home from meeting. Her fine glass lamp-shade, the one Granddad brought her from town, with flowers on it, broke right in two in her hand. She hadn’t dropped it, or knocked it against anything, but it broke in two in her hand. Her moaning talk changed to a kind of singing as her body rocked from side to side. Her face turned up to the sky, her eyes gazed straight at the sun, and over and over she wailed the same words until the littlest children all cried out and screamed them too:
“Las night I been know
Somebody gwine dead!