"Трумэн Капоте. The grass harp (Луговая арфа, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

which lasted the whole day, Catherine fried a chicken and deviled a dozen
eggs, and Dolly took along a chocolate layer cake and a supply of divinity
fudge. Thus armed, and carrying three empty grain sacks, we walked out the
church road past the cemetery and through the field of Indian grass. Just
entering the woods there was a double-trunked China tree, really two trees,
but their branches were so embraced that you could step from one into the
other; in fact, they were bridged by a tree-house: spacious, sturdy, a model
of a tree-house, it was like a raft floating in the sea of leaves. The boys
who built it, provided they are still alive, must by now be very old men;
certainly the tree-house was fifteen or twenty years old when Dolly first
found it and that was a quarter of a century before she showed it to me. To
reach it was easy as climbing stairs; there were footholds of gnarled bark
and tough vines to grip; even Catherine, who was heavy around the hips and
complained of rheumatism, had no trouble. But Catherine felt no love for the
tree-house; she did not know, as Dolly knew and made me know, that it was a
ship, that to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every
dream. Mark my word, said Catherine, them boards are too old, them nails are
slippery as worms, gonna crack in two, gonna fall and bust our heads don't I
know it.
Storing our provisions in the tree-house, we separated into the woods,
each carrying a grain sack to be filled with herbs, leaves, strange roots.
No one, not even Catherine, knew altogether what went into the medicine, for
it was a secret Dolly kept to herself, and we were never allowed to look at
the gatherings in her own sack: she held tight to it, as though inside she
had captive a blue-haired child, a bewitched prince. This was her story:
"Once, back yonder when we were children (Verena still with her babyteeth
and Catherine no higher than a fence post) there were gipsies thick as birds
in a blackberry patch-not like now, when maybe you see a few straggling
through each year. They came with spring: sudden, like the dogwood pink,
there they were-up and down the road and in the woods around. But our men
hated the sight of them, and daddy, that was your great-uncle Uriah, said he
would shoot any he caught on our place. And so I never told when I saw (he
gipsies taking water from the creek or stealing old winter pecans off the
ground. Then one evening, it was April and falling rain, I went out to the
cowshed where Fairybell had a new little calf; and there in the cowshed were
three gipsy women, two of them old and one of them young, and the young one
was lying naked and twisting on the cornshucks. When they saw that I was not
afraid, that I was not going to run and tell, one of the old women asked
would I bring a light So I went to the house for a candle, and when I came
back the woman who had sent me was holding a red hollering baby upside down
by its feet, and the other woman was milking Fairybell. I helped them wash
the baby in the warm milk and wrap it in a scarf. Then one of the old women
took my hand and said: Now I am going to give you a gift by teaching you a
rhyme. It was a rhyme about evergreen bark, dragonfly fern-and all the other
things we come here in the woods to find: Boil till dark and pure if you
want a dropsy cure. In the morning they were gone; I looked for them in the
fields and on the road; there was nothing left of them but the rhyme in my
head."
Calling to each other, hooting like owls loose in the daytime, we
worked all morning in opposite parts of the woods. Towards afternoon, our