I can still see Mary pushing her latest child in the old coach with the broken wheel. That "clacking " noise it made let me know she was coming when she was a block away. She always had a vague expression on her face, as though she was only half awake, and I always wondered if she could talk, for I never heard her make a sound in all the years she lived in town. Her husband (Happy) looked like the grandfather in the Beverly Hillbillies, and never smiled, and it amused me to hear folks call him by name, for I'm sure his mouth had always turned upside-down. They lived in a little shack near the movie, and on Saturday afternoons we stood in line for the matinee and had to pass their one-room house. The door was always open and it always amazed me that so many people could sleep in one bed, and that the color of their sheets was not white, but grey. One day I walked by, and they were gone. Old Mary died, they said, and Hap turned those kids over to the county, and then he traveled on. I can still see poor Mary, sorting through the trash and tucking some treasure deep inside that coach, I can still hear the "clackety clack it made, in the echoes of my mind. -- copyright November 2000 Judith Anne Labriola
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