Fiddler

"Burn off please, Lord, make it burn off before he stays home today. Don't let
him stay home today"

Melvin, staring out the second story hall window, eyes wide one moment, then
squeezed shut in concentration and prayer the next, looking up the holler at the low
hanging dense mist that hangs over and envelops the whole world.

"If it don't burn offif it rains, he'll never go on off and work that field today
and I'll never get to practice and then I won't be able to show him and I can almost..."

Nine years old, a few inches shy of four feet tall, skinny as a snake, and strong
for his age and size, Melvin, standing in his bare feet on the cold floor, continues the litany, alternating fervent prayer and his own more personal urging for the weather to just clear up and not rain today, especially today.

It is almost six in the morning and the sounds of the others in the two story frame farmhouse begin intruding on his concentration: Emma and Lottie, his two younger sisters, are stirring and he can hear the four-year-old and her three-years-older sister giggling about something or other through the wall of the bedroom they share.

His brother Ronzil, of course, is already gone from the other bed in the room that
he and Melvin sleep in, out in the barn with Daddy, getting started on the day's chores, and Mama's bustling (always a somehow smooth' sound) begins to penetrate his
consciousness all the way from the kitchen. And the breakfast smells from that kitchen

He scurries down the hall to his room, shucks the long-johns he wears to sleep in,
and fairly flies into his day clothes, all the while continuing the "Please, please burn off, don't let it rain" he had started the second he had looked out at the dismal, gray-draped countryside.

As he finishes tying the laces on the high top work shoes that he wears
'everyday' he hears Ron and Daddy clomping into the house for breakfast, Ron's
thirteen-year-old voice still high pitched and just starting to crack a little, louder for sure than Daddy's, who never yelled or spoke loudly in all the time that Melvin could remember.

"Well she went and had it Mama, must have been early this morning just
standing there with her, proud as could be, the two of them when we got there, must
have been easy as pie, prettiest calf you ever saw, all already licked dry and everything" comes rushing out of Ronzil like a spring flood, everything all tangled up together and moving fast.

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