Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/320

 Gaylord turned when Rogers referred to "Jake." He saw a brown faced middle aged man, dressed in overalls, sitting on top of a red tractor. He waved without speaking and continued down the plowed rows as unobtrusively as he had approached.

"Jake and his wife farm for us. They're not bad renters. She dips snuff; that's what Mother doesn't like."

"I don't see why anyone would want to use that nasty stuff."

"I don't either but she does. Spits in a can and has a piece of stick in her mouth all the time." Rogers' hand went in front of him. "See that big tree over there?" Gaylord nodded. "Pull up under it and your car will be in the shade."

"You mean this is it."

"This is it."

"I don't see any creek."

Rogers laughed, then grinned. "It's just in the woods a little ways … you'll see it."

He stopped under the tree's low branches and they both got out.

Gaylord pulled at the moss that hung from them like beards from old men. He remembered another woods of days past … A woods and creek that ran through the oil field he used to live in. He remembered how they used to run hand in hand across the yards, and then crawl under the barbed wire which protected the creek and woods from the cows which grazed among the yards.

Safely inside, he and past playmates used to play in the small creek, they fished for minnows, with bent pins for hooks, and grasshoppers for bait.

All the memories of the creek running under the cluster of willows were so acutely happy that they forced a sudden longing to Gaylord's eyes. In those days he had been joyous with every sense of the body. He had often thought since that that kind of happiness would never come again. That it had been lost when they had moved away … perhaps he had been wrong …

Gaylord's eyes were brought back to the present by catching the glint of light on the box under Rogers' arm. And now Rogers looked at him and bade him follow.

"These sandwiches sure are going to be good," Rogers grinned.

"I hope so … is the box heavy?" 310