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

sacks fat with skinned bark, tender, torn roots, we climbed back into the
green web of the China tree and spread the food. There was good creek water
in a mason jar, or if the weather was cold a thermos of hot coffee, and we
wadded leaves to wipe our chicken-stained, fudge-sticky fingers. Afterwards,
telling fortunes with flowers, speaking of sleepy things, it was as though
we floated through the afternoon on the raft in the tree; we belonged there,
as the sun-silvered leaves belonged, the dwelling whippoorwills.
About once a year I go over to the house on Talbo Lane, and walk around
in the yard. I was there the other day, and came across an old iron tub
lying overturned in the weeds like a black fallen meteor: Dolly-Dolly,
hovering over the tub dropping our grain-sack gatherings into boiling water
and stirring, stirring with a sawed-off broomstick the brown as tobacco spit
brew. She did the mixing of the medicine alone while Catherine and I stood
watching like apprentices to a witch. We all helped later with the bottling
of it and, because it produced a fume that exploded ordinary corks, my
particular job was to roll stoppers of toilet paper. Sales averaged around
six bottles a week, at two dollars a bottle. The money. Dolly said, belonged
to the three of us, and we spent it fast as it came in. We were always
sending away for stuff advertised in magazines: Take Up Woodcarving,
Parcheesi: the game for young and old. Anyone Can Play A Bazooka. Once we
sent away for a book of French lessons: it was my idea that if we got to
talk French we would have a secret language that Verena or nobody would
understand. Dolly was willing to try, but "Passez-moi a spoon" was the best
she ever did, and after learning "Je suis fatigue," Catherine never opened
the book again: she said that was all she needed to know.
Verena often remarked that there would be trouble if anyone ever got
poisoned, but otherwise she did not show much interest in the dropsy cure.
Then one year we totaled up and found we'd earned enough to have to pay an
income tax. Whereupon Verena began asking questions: money was like a
wildcat whose trail she stalked with a trained hunter's muffled step and an
eye for every broken twig. What, she wanted to know, went into the medicine?
and Dolly, flattered, almost giggling, nonetheless waved her hands and said
Well this and that, nothing special.
Verena seemed to let the matter die; yet very often, sitting at the
supper table, her eyes paused ponderingly on Dolly, and once, when we were
gathered in the yard around the boiling tub, I looked up and saw Verena in a
window watching us with uninterrupted fixity: by then, I suppose, her plan
had taken shape, but she did not make her first move until summer.
Twice a year, in January and again in August, Verena went on buying
trips to St. Louis or Chicago. That summer, the summer I reached sixteen,
she went to Chicago and after two weeks returned accompanied by a man called
Dr. Morris Ritz. Naturally everyone wondered who was Dr. Morris Ritz? He
wore bow ties and sharp jazzy suits; his lips were blue and he had gaudy
small swerving eyes; altogether, he looked like a mean mouse. We heard that
he lived in the best room at the Lola Hotel and ate steak dinners at Phil's
Cafe. On the streets he strutted along bobbing his shiny head at every
passerby; he made no friends, however, and was not seen in the company of
anyone except Verena, who never brought him to the house and never mentioned
his name until one day Catherine had the gall to say, "Miss Verena, just who
is this funny looking little Dr. Morris Ritz?" and Verena, getting white