Like the Appearance of Horses by Andrew Krivak EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Andrew Krivak
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
UNTO THE LAND
(1933–1938)
She was eleven and she stood before the picture window of her father’s
house and watched the figure of the traveler as he came into view from the
road. Watched him walk stooped from the pack on his back, then straighten
when she knew he could see the house before he could see the treetops.
Watched him quicken his step as though he had walked a long way for a
long time and what he sought was now as close as walking through a gate,
and this was his sole intention. He stopped for a moment and squared
himself before the entrance of the property, his eyes moving, his head
lifting slowly, slowly, all with a kind of wonder, from the orchard grounds
to the stone foundation, the balcony and high framed windows, the slate tile
roof. Then he lowered his head and stepped from the road to the dirt drive
that skirted the long line of apple trees and pear trees and split off onto
paving cobbles that bent like a silver river through the silver-rimed grass
and stopped at the foot of the stone front steps.
From a distance he looked like a man. Closer now she could see he was
a boy in the clothes of a man. Clothes from a place where a man and the
work he did were nothing like any man who worked and lived in Dardan.
She remembered the photographs she had seen of people, to her eye,
similarly dressed in the pages of the National Geographic magazines her
father brought to her from Miss Cording’s house (the woman who was onethird owner of the Endless Roughing Mill handing Jozef Vinich a stack
bound by a lavender ribbon, and saying, Take these for Hannah, poor girl,
all alone up there on that mountain of yours, when Vinich and Asa Pound
met with her over brandy to discuss the finances of the mill). The South
American gauchos who rode their brown and piebald horses along the
lowland pampas grass, mountains snowcapped in the distance. The colorful
Mongol riders of the steppes who pressed forward mounts short and largeheaded across land some god had created for them alone to cross. And a
people called the Lovari Roma, outcasts wandering in great caravans of
vardos drawn by collared equine that followed paths among not mountains
or grasslands but the hinterlands of the towns and cities of Middle Europe.
And yet for all of these riders her imagination conjured, this boy, this young
man, came alone and on foot and looking as though the land he had left was
land bereft of any horse, rider, or path, and that was why he had come. His
boots were creased and scuffed and colorless from toe to shaft, the soles
themselves looking as though they were sewn tight to their uppers by sinew
known only to the cobbler who had fashioned them. The trousers he wore
appeared so faded and thin, the material of which they were made seemed
to carry as much dust as threads between each woof and warp.
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