Two Shades of Morning by Janice Daugharty Page B

had been thrown out like yesterday’s greens. A new world for starting over, I decided, refreshed and appreciative of the old. How much can old cost? I’d always thought of old as something that came about with time.
    The brass beds upstairs had gone out like lights and in their spaces, scrolled oak headboards stood along the walls papered with pastoral motifs. (Sibyl seldom bought one of anything; if she liked something a lot she bought lots.) A clean cedar scent spiced the house, and there was a faint fragrance of baked apples and cinnamon, though nothing was baking. Wicker baskets of catalogues and magazines and odd-fashioned cushions—one in the shape of a heart—were scattered about on the living room floor.
    I sat in a padded rocker before the picture window, framed in white country curtains, and watched the moss in the oaks stir lazy patterns on the raked dirt. I was lulled by her natural manner and the cozy house into almost believing, almost caught up in her spell, as the afternoon ticked down to the tune of a grandfather clock.
    “No,” she said, when I tried to help her get ready for the party. “You’re company. You don’t have to do a thing but just sit and look pretty.”
    “But...”
    “Me and Mae’s got everything together,” she interrupted, placing a hand on my arm and showering me with her golden haze. I followed her out the back door anyway, pausing to straighten a welcome mat she’d flipped with her boot toe, and stood inhaling the honeysuckle and the summery air. Gazing off at my own yard, I could see P.W.’s cream-colored Ford flashing the afternoon sun back at the tin sky. Finally he had repainted it, and luster restored, the old car promised to take on its original allure. One step at a time, crop to crop. Maybe next year he could replace the rotten tires and sport around in it for a while before selling it.
    A rhythmic clank of rake tines on dirt carried on the air with the whirring of locusts, and I spied Punk raking between a group of oaks on the front yard. Feeling good now—all bad feelings behind me—I decided to come right out and talk to him.
    “Hey, Punk,” I called, lagging behind Sibyl, who was hiking on toward the barn.
    “Miss Earlene,” he said, walking away as he raked.
    “Are you still upset, Punk?” I followed him.
    “Nome.” “She’s just highstrung, Punk.”
    “Yas ‘um, she be that awright.”
    “What’d Robert Dale have to say about the horse?”
    “He don’t say nothing. I done and knocked off fore he come in.” He stopped raking, leaned on the rake handle and tilted his keen face. “Mr. P.W. say for you to tell me something?”
    “He didn’t have anything for you to do, Punk. I’m sorry. He can’t afford to hire too much help, you know.”
    “Yas ‘um, I be on with my sweeping now.”
    “Well, at least you got a pretty place to work.” Saying that was stupid, I knew. “Just do what you have to and stay out of her way.” Saying the last part was stupider.
    “Sho will now, but she can’t go on a-beating and framming on folk just cause she can.” “No, she shouldn’t. You want me to talk to her?”
    “Nome,” he said, looking at me good now with eyes quick and bright. “She done badmouthed you and me till Mr. P.W. liable to haul off and shoot me.”
    “Naw,” I said, trying to sound lighter than I felt. “He wouldn’t pay any attention to something like that. I guess she just fired off before she thought.
    “Yas ‘um, but she ain’t got no business...” He stopped talking and shot off raking whipstitches among the oak roots, trampling polleny honeysuckle petals like dross of sun.
    I started to follow him, to tell him that Sibyl was probably moody because she was sick—she had to feel bad if she had cancer—and that she probably regretted what she’d said yesterday and didn’t know how to make up for it. Look at her today! She’d come right out and told me she was dying, which could be her way of apologizing. Saying