Cloudstreet

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SUN poured careless into the quiet yard where vegetables teemed in the earth and fruit hung, where a scarfaced pig sang sweetly at the sky and a small congregation amassed in the light. Beneath the ancient mulberry tree whose blood stained the soil around her, a square little woman unpegged and folded a tent, taking it corner to corner, minding its brittle, rimed fabric, smacking the dust from it. Another woman stepped forward, tottering a little. She crossed the long gash in the ground where yesterday there’d been a fence, and she took a corner of the tent herself. The little boxy woman and the big blowsy woman folded end to end till the tent was a parcel that they hefted to their shoulders across the greensmelling grass, and then they went inside the big old house whose door stood open, pressed back by the breeze they made in passing.