Read Online The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks by Russell Banks - Free Book Online Page A

always been the same. From the very first, when Mrs. Allan took you outside the church after the service one Sunday morning and walked to the graveyard and stood hand in hand with you above the freshly cut plaque laid in the ground and told you that your mother’s body was buried here, precisely here, at this spot, from that very first time until this, it has been the same for you. Silence in your ears, no noise from without, no words from within, and a feeling, painful and frightening, of falling, as if down a well that reaches to the center of the earth. Yet, despite that feeling, you have returned to this spot compulsively, like an animal driven by an instinct. You have no sense of there being a reason for it. It is as if you are drawn there by a force that originates there, at the grave, not here inside your own head, among your sensations, memories, and ideas of the sanctified and holy. No, the power lies in that graveyard, in that one, all but unmarked grave. And now, as a middle-aged man in the middle of an illustrious career, as the poet Edgar Poe author of “The Raven,” you find yourself standing once again in that cool, tree-shaded cemetery beside the old Episcopal church on the hill, and once again you descend into a well of silence. Your mind has gone mute, and you no longer hear the wind in the leaves overhead, the wagon and carriage traffic on the cobbled street behind you, the morning twitter of birds and the coo of the doves from the niches of the steeple. You look down at the grassy plot of ground before you, the tarnished plaque at your feet, and you feel yourself begin the descent. But this time, for no cause you can name, now or later, at the point of its beginning, before you have become terrified, you resist. You pull away and step back a few paces as if from a slap, and you bring the entire grave into your gaze and sharply into focus, the rich green grass, the switching patterns of shadow and sunlight on the grass, the square plaque sinking into the ground at the head of the grave. You can see each individual blade of grass, even those bent and crushed beneath the feet of some passing cleric or attendant this very morning. You are still wrapped in silence, as if in a caul. You can hear nothing, nothing. And you have no thought. You watch the shadows cast on the grave by the fluttering leaves of the live oak overhead, and slowly they organize into an image, one that you yourself are surely creating as you watch, but an image which nonetheless exists in the world outside you, a configuration of shade against sunlight on the grassy plot of your mother’s grave. The shades separate, move together, slowly swirl, separate, and come together again, until you begin to see the shape of a single eye, large, wide open, an extraordinary eye, a wholly familiar eye, yet one that you have never seen before. It resembles an eye you have seen in daguerreotypes. And in mirrors. It is the eye of a close blood relation, it is your mother’s eye, it is your own eye. You stare peacefully into it, and feel it stare peacefully back. Then, gradually, the image fades, the shadows move apart, and the eye is gone from your sight. But you can remember it. You instantly recall it to your mind, as if to test the reality of the experience, and it appears there, as tender and filled with love for you as when it first appeared out of the shadows. You turn and slowly leave the cemetery. As you climb into the waiting carriage, you try once again to remember your mother, and you see her beautiful dark eye, her loving gaze on you, her only son, her beloved child.

The Fisherman
    In the northcountry, if you have an abstract turn of mind, you tend to measure the approach of winter by the sun, how in late October it starts slipping toward the southern horizon, spending less and less time each day in the sky and, because of that, seems to move across the sky at an accelerated rate, as if in a hurry to depart from this chilled part of the