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Bushkill
Choir
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| Now it's
true that Joseph Mailer's daughter is preponderantly gorgeous, she makes
men nod knowingly to one another as her parts each swivel and bob on by,
and her name is Nikki. But Sara Britches had a devil of a time finding
her, so she brought Joseph Mailer's niece instead, Minnow, a puckish girl
of twenty. Her hair is dark and it drops and coils to the odd hop in her
gait, she rolls on her heals and up to her toes and her face never shies
from the sun; and when she was brought to the choir in the yard, the Committee
for the Coupling of Norman Quill was convinced it had its model woman.
"Well she's perfect," says Jerry Knots. "They'll have a good time, " says Jonas. "Sure, sure," says Perry Britches. All the while Pastor Tim, their doer of miracles, is watching Norman Quill sing. He's noticed the school busses, the prison busses, and a pair and the whole of Neddy Bunts' taxi fleet down the road. Bushkill school children gawking at the human in the prisoners, seeing the shapes of their fathers and uncles, and the Catesville prisoners reckoning the same of their sons and daughters, when Bart Carter's son and his improvised tractor and trailer/parking shuttle split both groups in two and the teacher and the warden are visibly glad to settle their head counts once the tractor stops. More strangers in denim emptying the trailer and joining their ranks in the neighboring fields, bending the young corn stalks into willow figures and kinking the vines of the tomato plants, ruckusing the shale of the stone walls and claiming the lower branches of the oaks. And there too is Norman Quill, singing with his eyes shut, willfully blind to the eddy of empty space around him, a space that newcomers beware, and join the surrounding blooms and sing impossibly louder. Pastor Tim, and because he has to, wonders aloud, and he wonders aloud when he'll ever be able to read and study and write again, when only the bullfrogs duel and all the locusts stop at once. He wonders aloud when he'll be able to read and study and write again, and against the whirling bellow of noise outside he thinks how very odd his own voice sounds. How displaced and otherworldly, distant and alien. He sings a line he wrote, "in troves they must/in boughs they lay," and he can't remember what he meant by it, or if he had addressed it to a person real or imaginary, but he's certain he's able to riddle it out once the choir ends and the crickets tune and the locusts stop all together. Except louder the choir sings, and so does Norman Quill, and so does the choir; all but a few concerned men and an impish girl in their middle, walking down the road to get away from the racket. |
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"You
can call me Minnow, too," she says
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