pinkness has begun to creep across the lid. She rubs at it.
“Leave it alone,” Elizabeth says.
The child drops her hand into her lap.
They sit together, waiting, in the awkward silence.
God was something Elizabeth had never questioned—did not doubt, did not think about or fear—her faith was as natural to her as air.
The magic of a salmon who ate the nuts of a hazel tree. A boy-hero who caught the fish, boiled it, and drank its wisdom from the scalded broth.
The child’s eye has begun to tear. She does not touch it. She just sits there, painfully still, with her hands in her lap and a slight fluid running from the corner of the swelling down her face.
Elizabeth cancels the trip they were supposed to take to the Grist Mill in Adamsville. When Charles pulls up in the car, she tells him to go on his own or not at all. She sends Maggie down into the cold cellar for three apples. She boils one and grinds it into a poultice. The child’s eye has grown so swollen the iris is barely visible. Elizabeth puts two spoonfuls of the apple mush into a square of muslin, and she sets it firmly against the infected lid.
“Hold it there,” she tells the child. “We’ll bake the other two.”
Eve nods, one-eyed, her small hand holding the cloth against her face.
Elizabeth sets the two apples into the wood oven and, together, she and Eve sit in the kitchen. They wait until the skins crack, until the warm smell of apple surrounds them. They take the pulp from one outside and bury it under the willow tree in the late summer ground. Then they eat the other one.
CHAPTER 9
Jake
H e does not see the girl again. He goes back once more to the field with his father to load the last few stones. As they haul the two-horse sled up the wagon path, he notices a small red sweater hanging on the back of one of the porch chairs. They drive the stones across town to Old Pine Hill Road, where they will begin the work of building a new wall. He does not come around the house again until the end of August, and by that time she is gone.
In September, when classes start at the Point School and the mitts of the sassafras leaves begin to brown, Jake walks through the bleat of sparrows to the library at Skirdagh. He lets himself in through the latched side door.
As he reads Elizabeth’s books, he begins to understand that a story can be hunted out like small game, or like light. It is an interim of trance with flaws and scars. It changes being touched. He will skin what he reads, separating gut, lung, scale, the open flay from tail to throat. He struggles after the innards and floats in the fibrous gap between words. Once in a while, he will surface from a text, short of breath and incomplete, and he will sense the girl the way he saw her that day, blond and falling through grass.
He turns the pages through the fall, wrapping himself in the thin flannel blanket Maggie leaves for him folded on the sofa. He extractsbrief passages and takes those nuggets with him. He chews on them as he sits at the small wooden desk by the back stove in the Point School, or as he is chinking sod into the gaps of one of his father’s walls, or when he is alone in the kitchen with his mother and she is boiling the raspberries for jam. He watches her string the cheesecloth jelly bag to a broomstick laid across two chairs. He does not tell her about the books he reads, about the ideas of nothingness and being that he has begun to gather like ripe plums from the dunes. He sets the iron kettle for her on the floor, and together they watch the fruit distill to a clear juice through the pores, and he is aware that what they witness is like any other work of art: the honing of a being to its essence.
As he reads, Jake grows displaced from his own life: the life of docks and skiffs; the seasonal trapping of muskrat, rabbit, and mink; the harvesting of wood and ice and stone. His world acquires an alien luster and, in the library of Elizabeth Gonne Lowe, he seeks out
“Leave it alone,” Elizabeth says.
The child drops her hand into her lap.
They sit together, waiting, in the awkward silence.
God was something Elizabeth had never questioned—did not doubt, did not think about or fear—her faith was as natural to her as air.
The magic of a salmon who ate the nuts of a hazel tree. A boy-hero who caught the fish, boiled it, and drank its wisdom from the scalded broth.
The child’s eye has begun to tear. She does not touch it. She just sits there, painfully still, with her hands in her lap and a slight fluid running from the corner of the swelling down her face.
Elizabeth cancels the trip they were supposed to take to the Grist Mill in Adamsville. When Charles pulls up in the car, she tells him to go on his own or not at all. She sends Maggie down into the cold cellar for three apples. She boils one and grinds it into a poultice. The child’s eye has grown so swollen the iris is barely visible. Elizabeth puts two spoonfuls of the apple mush into a square of muslin, and she sets it firmly against the infected lid.
“Hold it there,” she tells the child. “We’ll bake the other two.”
Eve nods, one-eyed, her small hand holding the cloth against her face.
Elizabeth sets the two apples into the wood oven and, together, she and Eve sit in the kitchen. They wait until the skins crack, until the warm smell of apple surrounds them. They take the pulp from one outside and bury it under the willow tree in the late summer ground. Then they eat the other one.
CHAPTER 9
Jake
H e does not see the girl again. He goes back once more to the field with his father to load the last few stones. As they haul the two-horse sled up the wagon path, he notices a small red sweater hanging on the back of one of the porch chairs. They drive the stones across town to Old Pine Hill Road, where they will begin the work of building a new wall. He does not come around the house again until the end of August, and by that time she is gone.
In September, when classes start at the Point School and the mitts of the sassafras leaves begin to brown, Jake walks through the bleat of sparrows to the library at Skirdagh. He lets himself in through the latched side door.
As he reads Elizabeth’s books, he begins to understand that a story can be hunted out like small game, or like light. It is an interim of trance with flaws and scars. It changes being touched. He will skin what he reads, separating gut, lung, scale, the open flay from tail to throat. He struggles after the innards and floats in the fibrous gap between words. Once in a while, he will surface from a text, short of breath and incomplete, and he will sense the girl the way he saw her that day, blond and falling through grass.
He turns the pages through the fall, wrapping himself in the thin flannel blanket Maggie leaves for him folded on the sofa. He extractsbrief passages and takes those nuggets with him. He chews on them as he sits at the small wooden desk by the back stove in the Point School, or as he is chinking sod into the gaps of one of his father’s walls, or when he is alone in the kitchen with his mother and she is boiling the raspberries for jam. He watches her string the cheesecloth jelly bag to a broomstick laid across two chairs. He does not tell her about the books he reads, about the ideas of nothingness and being that he has begun to gather like ripe plums from the dunes. He sets the iron kettle for her on the floor, and together they watch the fruit distill to a clear juice through the pores, and he is aware that what they witness is like any other work of art: the honing of a being to its essence.
As he reads, Jake grows displaced from his own life: the life of docks and skiffs; the seasonal trapping of muskrat, rabbit, and mink; the harvesting of wood and ice and stone. His world acquires an alien luster and, in the library of Elizabeth Gonne Lowe, he seeks out
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