excerpt
“Well, he says they’re bothering people and causing a fire hazard.
He’s going to try to get the council to tell Chief Spanger to
clean em out of there and get the railroad bulls to start whackin’ on
’em.”
“Not a lot for a mayor to do in a town this size, is there?”
Winifred said.
He wants the council to tell the chief to go after other people living
along the river. Poodie James, for instance.”
“Poodie James never hurt a fly.”
“Right. What should we do?
“Do?” As she thought, Winifred tapped the earpiece of her
reading glasses against her lower front teeth. “We’ll keep an eye on
it, that’s what we’ll do. The only problem with Poodie is that he’s
going to go down in one of those currents if he can’t stay out of that
damn river.”
Winifred Stone had the posture and nearly the same figure as
when she and Jeremy came from Chicago in July of 1903. Seven
months pregnant, standing on a hilltop in the dust and the dry
wind, she cried when he showed her the valley that day. Except for
a few scattered orchards, it was as raw as an open heat blister. She
wanted to be back on the balcony of her house on Lakeshore Drive,
watching sailboats tack in the Lake Michigan breeze, not stifling
in air as parched as an oven’s. She thought Jeremy was raving when
he told her it would be one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Water would do it, he said. It was on the way. The hills would be
covered with blossoms in the spring and big red apples in the fall.
As he spoke, Jeremy swept his hat across the horizon and it seemed
to her that in his height, his leanness and idealism, he towered over
the valley. They were going to help it happen, he said, because
there was no limit to what a newspaper could accomplish if it
believed in itself and its people.
At first, her new husband’s enthusiasm embarrassed a girl
plucked out of Chicago society and set down among the scrub
brush and boulders of a western valley. Then she caught his ambition
like a contagion.
Libros Libertad 