Tally Ho (Short Story‪)‬

The summer I turned nine, my older brothers dismantled three iron bedsteads inside the house and reassembled them under the paradise trees in the yard. They carried out the mattresses and lay them across the slats and there the beds remained for the rest of the summer, for we kids had decided that we wanted to sleep outside. We could do this because we lived in the country, far from the influence of families who lived by rules. We lived in the northern Texas Panhandle between two creeks, dry for most of the year, so our yard was full of sand rather than grass. Each morning, we shook the sand out of our sheets and carried them and the pillows into the house. At night we carried them back out again to remake the beds, first checking the mattresses by flashlight for ants, centipedes, and scorpions. J slept snugly between my oldest sisters, Georgia and Delia; the twins, Liz and Annie, slept on the bed next to us. Will slept alone on an army cot, and Jake and Matt took the third bed.