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The Old Man was dead.
Maude and Charlie drove up in Maude's husband's beat-up black '32 Ford coupe. Buddy knew what they were going to say before the first knuckle of Maude's age-speckled hand rapped on the door. Not that the Old Man had been sick or anything, but the boy had had a premonition the Old Man was slipping.
Buddy was pulling the bucket of water up from the bottom of the well two days ago when the rope snapped. The bucket went cascading down that black hole like a boulder plows down the mountain during a mudslide.
That was when an uneasy heaviness fell upon him that some calamity or other was about to fall on the Old Man.
You see, it was the Old Man's rope. His bucket, too.
***
"You standin' there waitin' for God to speak from the bottom of that well?" Geraldine asked on the way to the barn to milk the cow, Flossie.
"Rope just broke," Buddy said, softly. "Lost the bucket, too."
"Well," she said, "it ain't like we ain't got anoth'ern, Buddy."
He looked down at the bottomless, gaping pit.
Come to think of it, something might just live down there. Not God, but something evil. Something that loved dark, wet, scary places, and although Geraldine was not Buddy's favorite person, he followed her into the barn to make a show of trying to find another bucket.
And he'd stay in that barn, too.
At least until the sun decided to show its bright, shining face.
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Love Songs: The Wrong Note - A Collection of Short Stories
General FictionA second volume of short stories in the Love Songs collection. Many of the stories in this collection focus on the theme of love and how it sometimes goes wrong. A large collection of stories that run the gamut from humorous to tragic. 1. Love Songs...
