crib at the foot of the cot. It was the same crib all of his brothers and sisters used. And it was the same crib little Hollis had slept in. Hollis’ daddy had carved the crib while his mama carried Hollis in her belly, chopping the wood himself, and using what little money he could scrape together to get the nails. But some of the nails were at weird angles. They were bent, broken and poking out, crooked like the teeth of a man who can’t afford to have them otherwise. Hollis believed his father used the heel of his left boot to pound them in. There never was a hammer to be found in the house, only the family knife.
I’ll be Back JAMES BELL
Hollis Brown was not a lucky man. Anyone ’round these parts will tell you as much. It seemed some kind of specter forever loomed over him and his family. His mother died soon after he was born. His sister died from lack of a mother. His brother died from lack of a sister. And his father, well, he let himself go before Hollis learned to walk. As far as luck was concerned, she never did like the Browns too much.
It was the fall of Hollis’ twenty-second year when the food got scarcer than ever. The dry breezes of the summer turned to cooler ones, as they always do, cutting through the holes in the wood shack quick and easy. They whistled past the pieces of iron Hollis had used to patch the holes, which only worked until the rain made the wood swell. Then it was time for more iron and more nails. “It’s getting awful breezy in here, Hollis.” “Mhmm.”
At twenty-two, Hollis made it much longer than any of his kin, all of whom, extended kin included, had passed on in some way or other. Hollis and his wife, Julie-Mae, had five kids. The last teat-sucker was only six months old. The rest of the children, the other four, were all the same. Two boys and two girls, but they were the same. It hurt Hollis to look at them. They never smiled. Thin thread and patches held their thin clothes together. Their feet were hard as stones, worn by long barefoot hours spent trampling twigs and thorns and burrs a ways out in the woods, and from running through fields to get what they could find. They were all skinny as hell, rib cages poking out and bellies big as juice jugs. And they all came about nine months after winter. You can’t blame Hollis and Julie-Mae. They had to keep the place warm somehow.
Being the God-fearing man he was, Hollis prayed and prayed for work, both for him and for his family. He even used the knife to whittle a cross that he hung on the wall. But as the days since his last job stacked up higher and higher, the weight of them began to crush what little faith he had left. The floorboards of his shack creaked and cracked like they were yelling at each other to figure which was the loudest, ready to snap any moment from too much pressure. He could feel them bend under the heels of the worn boots.
Hollis’ daddy had built the shack for two, but they packed the whole lot of them under that broken roof by the crossroads just the same. Hollis and Julie-Mae shared a cot on one wall. The two girls slept together on a small and rickety wooden bed across from the cot. The boys slept on the hard floor. The baby slept in a
Though Hollis never was a man of much intelligence, he was good with his hands. But, with the fall of the banks, the people in town weren’t too interested in that kind of man. Every farm was full up then. They’d all the hands they needed. What they wanted was a fancy man, a man in a fancy suit, a man with a
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James Bell
“Think we’ll need some more iron soon?” “We’ll be okay, Julie-Mae… for now.”
Berkeley Fiction Review
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