sleek train, some flying shuttle of business or commerce. Lucille and I might have been two of a numerous family, off to visit a grandmother in Lapwai. And they might have been touring legislators or members of a dance band. Then our being there on a bitter morning in ruined and unsuitable clothes, wordlessly looking at the water, would be entirely understandable. As it was, I thought of telling them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long before we were born. Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection. Perhaps we expected a train to leap out of the water, caboose foremost, as if in a movie run backward, and then to continue across the bridge. The passengers would arrive, sounder than they departed, accustomed to the depths, serene about their restoration to the light, disembarking at the station in Fingerbone with a calm that quieted the astonishment of friends. Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips, and then all of them went down the road to our house, my grandfather youngish and high-pocketed, just outside their conversation, like a difficult memory, or a ghost. Then Lucille and I could run off tothe woods, leaving them to talk of old times, and make sandwiches for lunch and show each other snapshots.
When letters were sent to Sylvie about our days and weeks out of school, Sylvie would compose little notes to the effect that the trouble lay with the discomforts of female adolescence. Some of these notes she mailed and some she did not. At the time I thought she lied very blandly about this, considering that she was, much of the time, wholly without guile. But perhaps what she told them was only what she forgot to tell us. Lucille was, often enough, a touchy, achy, tearful creature. Her clothes began to bind and pull, to irk and exasperate her. Her tiny, child-nippled breasts filled her with shame and me with alarm. Sylvie did tell me once that Lucille would mature before I did because she had red hair, and so it transpired. While she became a small woman, I became a towering child. What twinges, what aches I felt, what gathering toward fecundity, what novel and inevitable rhythms, were the work of my strenuous imagining.
We went up into the woods. Deep between two hills was an old quarry, which we were fond of pretending we had discovered. In places the stone stood in vertical shafts, six-sided or eight-sided, the height of stools or pillars. At the center of each of them was a sunburst, a few concentric circles, faint lines the color of rust. These we took to be the ruins of an ancient civilization. If we went up to the top of the quarry, we could ease ourselves a quarter of the way down its face on our toes along a diagonal cranny, till we came to a shallow cave, just deep enough for the two of us to sit in. There was a thicktuft of grass between us, always weathered, always coarse, that we stroked and plucked as if it were the pelt of an old dog. If we fell down here, who would find us? The hoboes would find us. The bears would find us.
No
one would find us. The robin so red brought strawberry leaves, Lucille would sing. There was an old mine at the foot of the quarry, where someone had looked for gold or silver. It was just a round black hole, an opening no bigger than a small well, so overgrown and rounded by grass that we could not tell just where the verge was. The mine (which we only looked at and threw things into) and the cave were a great and attractive terror.
The woods themselves disturbed us. We liked the little clearings, the burned-off places where wild strawberries grew. Buttercups are the materialization of the humid yellow light one finds in such places. (Buttercups in those mountains are rare and delicate, bright, lacquered, and big on short
When letters were sent to Sylvie about our days and weeks out of school, Sylvie would compose little notes to the effect that the trouble lay with the discomforts of female adolescence. Some of these notes she mailed and some she did not. At the time I thought she lied very blandly about this, considering that she was, much of the time, wholly without guile. But perhaps what she told them was only what she forgot to tell us. Lucille was, often enough, a touchy, achy, tearful creature. Her clothes began to bind and pull, to irk and exasperate her. Her tiny, child-nippled breasts filled her with shame and me with alarm. Sylvie did tell me once that Lucille would mature before I did because she had red hair, and so it transpired. While she became a small woman, I became a towering child. What twinges, what aches I felt, what gathering toward fecundity, what novel and inevitable rhythms, were the work of my strenuous imagining.
We went up into the woods. Deep between two hills was an old quarry, which we were fond of pretending we had discovered. In places the stone stood in vertical shafts, six-sided or eight-sided, the height of stools or pillars. At the center of each of them was a sunburst, a few concentric circles, faint lines the color of rust. These we took to be the ruins of an ancient civilization. If we went up to the top of the quarry, we could ease ourselves a quarter of the way down its face on our toes along a diagonal cranny, till we came to a shallow cave, just deep enough for the two of us to sit in. There was a thicktuft of grass between us, always weathered, always coarse, that we stroked and plucked as if it were the pelt of an old dog. If we fell down here, who would find us? The hoboes would find us. The bears would find us.
No
one would find us. The robin so red brought strawberry leaves, Lucille would sing. There was an old mine at the foot of the quarry, where someone had looked for gold or silver. It was just a round black hole, an opening no bigger than a small well, so overgrown and rounded by grass that we could not tell just where the verge was. The mine (which we only looked at and threw things into) and the cave were a great and attractive terror.
The woods themselves disturbed us. We liked the little clearings, the burned-off places where wild strawberries grew. Buttercups are the materialization of the humid yellow light one finds in such places. (Buttercups in those mountains are rare and delicate, bright, lacquered, and big on short
Similar Books
