"Трумэн Капоте. The grass harp (Луговая арфа, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автораask anyone into this house? And for a very simple reason: I'm ashamed to.
Look what happened today." I could hear the breath go out of Dolly. "I'm sorry," she said faintly. "I am truly. I'd always thought there was a place for us here, that you needed us somehow. But it's going to be all right now, Verena. We'll go away." Verena sighed. "Poor Dolly. Poor poor thing. Wherever would you go?" The answer, a little while in coming, was fragile as the flight of a moth; "I know a place." Later, I waited in bed for Dolly to come and kiss me goodnight. My room, beyond the parlor in a faraway comer of the house, was the room where their father, Mr. Uriah Talbo, had lived. In his mad old age, Verena had brought him here from the farm, and here he'd died, not knowing where he was. Though dead ten, fifteen years, the pee and tobacco old-man smell of him still saturated the mattress, the closet, and on a shelf in the closet was the one possession he'd carried away with him from the farm, a small yellow drum: as a lad my own age he'd marched in a Dixie regiment rattling this little yellow drum, and singing. Dolly said that when she was a girl she'd liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he'd died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us-it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields -I've heard Papa clear as day. On such a night, now that it was September, the autumn winds would be wondered if he was singing among them, the old man in whose bed I lay falling asleep. Then I thought Dolly at last had come to kiss me goodnight, for I woke up sensing her near me in the room; but it was almost morning, beginning light was like a flowering foliage at the windows, and roosters ranted in distant yards. "Shhh, Collin," Dolly whispered, bending over me. She was wearing a woolen winter suit and a hat with a traveling veil that misted her face. "I only wanted you to know where we are going." "To the tree-house?" I said, and thought I was talking in my sleep. Dolly nodded. "Just for now. Until we know better what our plans will be." She could see that I was frightened, and put her hand on my forehead. "You and Catherine: but not me?" and I was jerking with a chill. "You can't leave without me." The town clock was tolling; she seemed to be waiting for it to finish before making up her mind. It struck five, and by the time the note had died away I had climbed out of bed and rushed into my clothes. There was nothing for Dolly to say except: '"Don't forget your comb." Catherine met us in the yard; she was crooked over with the weight of a brimming oilcloth satchel; her eyes were swollen, she had been crying, and Dolly, oddly calm and certain of what she was doing, said it doesn't matter, Catherine-we can send for your goldfish once we find a place. Verena's closed quiet windows loomed above us; we moved cautiously past them and silently out the gate. A fox terrier barked at us; but there was no one on the street, and no one saw us pass through the town except a sleepless |
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