Remembering Read Online Free Page A

humming in there,” Henry said.
    â€œAhhhh, take your knife and cut it down!” Elton said. “There’s nothing in there.”
    â€œI swear I didn’t think there was,” he said, for the hundredth time, laughing and looking at Henry, who laughed and looked back, for the hundredth time not believing him.
    â€œSo I loaned him my knife. He didn’t have a knife, of course. Never did have one. Hasn’t got one yet. And he cut it down.
    â€œIt fell right on his feet. ‘Ow!’ he said. ‘Ow!’ He did a little dance, and then ran right out from under his hat. His clothes were just sizzling.”
    Elton was laughing while he told it, and they all laughed.
    â€œI reckon it’s a lot funnier now than it was then.”
    â€œA lot,” Henry said. “You were running before I even cut the string.”
    â€œ Naw, I wasn’t! No sir ! I was just as surprised as you.”
    That had been a long time ago, when Henry was about fourteen and Elton not yet thirty. Probably neither of them any longer knew whether Elton had known about the bees or not. But they played out their old game of accusation and denial once more, both enjoying it, both grateful to be in the same story.
    Elton pushed back his chair and got up as if to lead the way into the living room.
    â€œWell,” he said, “we’ve had some good times, haven’t we?”
    He staggered, reached to catch himself, failed. And all that was left of him fell to the floor.

    To Andy, Elton’s absence became a commanding presence. He was haunted by things he might have said to Elton that would not be sayable again in this world.
    That absence is with him now, but only as a weary fact, known but no
longer felt, as if by some displacement of mind or heart he is growing absent from it.
    It is the absence of everything he knows, and is known by, that surrounds him now.
    He is absent himself, perfectly absent. Only he knows where he is, and he is no place that he knows. His flesh feels its removal from other flesh that would recognize it or respond to its touch; it is numb with exile. He is present in his body, but his body is absent.
    He does not know what time it is. Nothing has changed since he woke. The darkness is not different, nor is the faint blur of light above the curtained window, nor are the muted night sounds of the streets.
    For a long time he has not moved. He lies with his unhanded right forearm upright in the air in the darkness, his body bemused at its own stillness, as if waiting patiently to see how long his strayed mind will take to notice it again.
    And now the anger he felt at the conference starts up in him again, for after his fear and grief and boredom it was anger that finally woke him and hardened him against that room. He did not belong there. He did not know anybody who did belong there.
    He listened to a paper on “Suggestible Parameters in the Creation of Agricultural Meaning,” read by a long-haired man with a weary face, who had never been consulted by a government and who read his paper diffidently, with oddly placed fits of haste, as if aware of the audience’s impending boredom or his own; and then another paper on “The Ontology and Epistemology of Agriculture as a Self-Correcting System,” read by a woman whose chief business was to keep anyone from viewing the inside of her mouth.
    It was endless, Andy thought, a place of eternal hopelessness, where people were condemned to talk forever of what they could not feel or see, old farm boys and old farm girls in the spell of an occult science, speaking in the absence of the living and the dead a language forever unintelligible to anyone but themselves.
    And then — it was nearly noon, and a number of the auditors were leaving — he heard himself introduced as “an agricultural journalist who could hardly be said to be complacent about the Future of the American
Food System, but whose ideas had