现代大学英语精读第六册-的第四课和第九课课文-原文.docVIP

Nettles Our farm was small-nine acres. It was small enough for me to have explored every part of it. Each of the trees on the place had an attitude and a presence-the elm looked serene and the oak threatening, the maples friendly, the hawthorn old and crabby. Even the pits on the river flats had their flats had their distinct character. The girls as well as the boys were divided into two sides. Each girl had her own pile of balls and was working for paticular soldiers, and when a soldier fell wounded he would call out a girl’s name, so that she could drag him away and dress his wounds as quickly as possible. I made weapons for Mike, and mine ws the name he called. There was a keen alarm when the cry came, a wire zinging through your whole body, a fanatic feeling of devotion. When Mike was wounded he never opened his eyes. He lay limp and still while I pressed slimy large leaves to his forehead and throat and-pulling out his shirt-to his pale tender stomach, with its sweet and vulnerable belly button. One morning, of course, the job was all finished, the well capped, the pump reinstated, the fresh water marvelled at. And the truck did not come. There were two fewer chairs at the table for the noon meal. Mike and I had barely looked at each other during those meals. He liked to put ketcup on his bread. His father talked to my father, and the talk was mostly about well, accidents, water tables. A serious man. All work, my father said. Yet- he-Mike’s father-ended nearly every speech with a laugh. The laugh had a lonely boom in it, as if he were still down the well. Sunny and I had been friends in Vancouver years before. Our pregnancies had dovetailed, so that we had managed with one set of maternity clothes. In my kitchen or in hers, once a week or so, distracted by our children and sometimes reeling for lack of sleep, we stoked ourselves up on strong coffee and cigarettes and launched out on a rampage of talk about our marriages, our personal deficiencies, our intere