"Sheri S. Tepper - The Family Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

ecstatic music in her head. A little girl whose every experience was accompanied by complicated and
fantastic sound: the thunder of deep drums, the bray of trumpets or the sonorous clamor of horns. In that
child's remembered life the sun rose to sensuous violins, noons were a stutter of brass, evenings waned


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in wandering oboe melodies, night faded into plush purple violas and bassoons. Every Little Dora day
had been joyous with music.
Of course, music was appropriate in paradise. She hadn't called it paradise at the time; she hadn't called
it anything, it was simply her world. When she walked out the front door of the house, she entered a
forest of trees, was surrounded by flocks of birds, met all kinds of animals that she talked with, had
conversations with. It was as vivid in her mind as if it had been yesterday.
Until Michael. From the moment Daddy called her "big sister," the music stopped and other living
things became sparse and occasional. The forest became one gaunt tree out back by the ash pit. The
flock of birds became one fat crow perched on the fence pecking at something dead held in his talons.
The beasts were only the neighbor's cat, the grocery man's dog.
She missed the music most, for it stopped so suddenly she thought she had gone deaf, wished she had
gone deaf so she couldn't hear Michael's fretful howling and Mama's petulant "Can't you quiet that
baby?" and Daddy's "For heaven's sake, feed that child, Dora, you know where the bottle is." Michael
didn't tolerate the formula very well. None of them ever tolerated the formula very well. Mama said she
had tried to nurse Dora, but she didn't feel well enough, and besides, she didn't like it, all that chewing at
her, so she wouldn't try with Michael.
There hadn't been another baby until Dora was seven-that was Kathleen-but after that it was like Mama
finally got the hang of it, and there'd been Margaret, and Mark and Luke and Millicent for Dora to be big
sister to. Then when Mama got pregnant with Polly-Polly was number eight-Grandma arrived out of
nowhere like a cyclone of gray hair and starched skirts. She spun around, looking here, looking there,
then took thirteen-year-old Dora by the hand and said enough was enough, what was Mama trying to
do? Set a new record?
And Mama just smiled that slow way she had and said she didn't think using anything was nice. That
Daddy wouldn't like it if she used anything.
"Well, the two of you have been using something! You've been using Dora!" said Grandma. "Look at
her! She looks like a dishrag! This child deserves a childhood." And that was it, because Grandma took
Dora with her when she went back to her own house in Denver, and it was like going to heaven, even
with all the weeding.
Meantime, back at home in Omaha, everything went from pillar to post, and two years after Jimbo was
born Mama died from something perfectly preventable, except they hadn't bothered to prevent, and then
Daddy fell apart, and Grandma asked him what the hell he expected, a medal?


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That's when the younger kids had come to Grandma's house, too. Michael was eleven, and Jimbo was
only two. And from then on it was Grandma and Grandpa and Dora and the kids, then after Grandpa
died, Grandma and Dora and the kids, and finally just Dora and the three left at home. Daddy was never
part of the equation.