Winterbound

Winterbound

Books by Margery Bianco
Available from Dover Publications

T
HE
V
ELVETEEN
R
ABBIT

P
OOR
C
ECCO

W
INTERBOUND

Contents

Winterbound

The House on the Hillside

KAY had been so long hunting out her color box, and the light had already begun to change so rapidly, that she gave up the idea of painting with a little sigh and sat, instead, looking out through the window, just noting in her mind the curve and line of the October hillside, the shape of tree and branch. Outside the house, beyond the little space of flower border with its zinnias and marigolds and the bank which Garry had terraced up, dragging big stones from the pasture through hot August days, the hillside dropped away in a slope of gray bowlders and red sumac, with the old twisted butternut tree just visible above the second stone wall, the last of its yellow leaves fluttering against the blue sky. Far below came the twist of the road again, winding downhill, and behind it rose hills and more hills, a blaze now of changing reds and purples. If only, Kay thought, one could really get those colors on paper so that they looked like something alive, as they were, not
just splotches of this and that, with no shape to them!

It was hard, for Kay's eye always ran ahead of her hand. She could see just how things looked, know exactly what they meant to her, but when she tried to set them down and make other people see them, too, it was never the same. The pattern always came out different. Garry even, who had no more idea of drawing than a cat, who didn't care one bit about painting except that she loyally admired everything Kay did, could take a pencil stub in her brown fingers and set down what a tree or a cow looked like, the way it was built, and though her drawing was awkward and crude there could be no mistaking that it was a tree or a cow. That, father had explained once, was because Garry was interested not so much in what things looked like as in how they were made and the way they grew; she knew that every tree had its roots solidly in the ground, it wasn't just floating in air, and that the tree's trunk and the cow's legs were that exact shape because of the weight they had to support. Her mind took after father's, that could tell from just looking at some old dug-up bone what sort of an animal it must have belonged to.

There was so much more to being an artist than merely wanting to set down beautiful things, and Kay's one year at art school had just brought her to the stage of beginning to find this out. And it was going to seem
more difficult than ever now, working by herself this winter. For art classes had had to stop with so many other things, and at nineteen, more perhaps than at any other age, life suddenly seems to be slipping by so fast that a year, even a month or a day, is far too precious to be spent on anything except the things one most wants to do. It was as if life were pushing one on and on and there wasn't a minute to waste. Martin and little Caroline were all right, and even Garry, at sixteen, didn't seem to have reached that stage yet and perhaps never would, for there always seemed a sense of leisure about Garry's undertakings, even when she worked her hardest. But Kay was all impatience. It showed in her movements, in her slim nervous build, in many ways that she herself recognized and in countless others that she didn't suspect.

A straight young figure in blue denim overalls passed the window, and a moment later Garry came in, pausing to drop an armful of fresh logs beside the hearth.

“It's going to turn cool tonight. I wouldn't wonder if we get a frost. Did mother say what time she'd be back?”

“I don't suppose she'll be very late. She said she'd get Edna to drive her back if there were a lot of parcels,”

Shopping, on the rare occasions when any of the Ellis family went into town, nine miles distant, usually did
mean a lot of parcels; more than any one person could comfortably bring home by the state-road bus.

“What's for supper?” Garry asked.

“Bread and butter and fish cakes, unless mother brings something in.”

“Those won't take long. We might have a cup of tea now while we're waiting. I got my cold-frame finished. I hope she remembers the putty.”

“It's time the children were back,” said Kay. “The school bus must have gone by ages ago. Did you see anything of them, Garry?”

“They're over at Rowe's, looking at the new calf.” Garry's voice came back from the kitchen, above the clatter of pump and kettle. “It's a cute one, all red, with a white star and one white foot.” She lighted the oil stove and came back to wait until the kettle should choose to boil. “Shopping is a pest in the country,” she went on, shifting the wood on the fire to make it burn more cheerfully, her mind still on the cold-frame and its unglazed sash. “It isn't just thinking of what you want; you've got to think of everything you're going to be likely to want for weeks ahead. There's one thing about it; you've no chance to spend money even if you had it. Which reminds me, I found fifty cents just now in my last year's sweater pocket. I think it should go on cabbage seed for the future sustenance of the Ellis family.”