Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 22

Lenore,” she called out the back door. “Lenore, come to the house. I know you can hear me.” Still undisturbed, she returned to Lenore’s room and picked up from the floor the book that had been propping open the window. A Prairie Wedding Among the Radishes, by Myrtle Kingsley Fitch. The local library was sponsoring a citywide read that summer, and we were all to read, and to discuss, A Prairie Wedding, a suitably musty bit of Pulitzer-winning frump from 1918. In the band shell at the park, Dr. Tanya Krelb, the Myrtle Kingsley Fitch Professor of English at the state university, gave a talk about the symbolism in the book—explaining what the pumpkin blossoms meant, and what it meant that a woman’s father was murdered at a bend in the river, and how we were to interpret the creaking of the katydids, the sound of which she mimicked with the aid of a wooden whistle handcarved from cedar, though many of us thought she sounded more like a locust. “Myrtle Kingsley Fitch is your sister,” the suspiciously unbridal Dr. Tanya Krelb told us, “her land is your land,” explaining that Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had grown up in our state, only miles from our town. Had Lenore not disappeared in July to distract us, we all would’ve been subjected to an autumn book festival.

Daisy opened the window, putting the book back on the sill to keep the window up. “Lenore,” she called out, and it was then, her calls met only with the stillness of the Crippled Eighty, the quiet noise the land had likely been making for centuries, that she first felt the loss of her daughter. She felt it in her stomach, a quick rush. She listened closer, trying to convince herself that the sound of the wind brushing the pasture grass was Lenore walking slowly up from the creek, knee-deep in the weeds. Her heart leaped with relief with the noise of a bird that sounded like a toy, the wings clacking, slapping, like wings made of wood.

“Lenore,” Daisy shouted, wanting Lenore to hear the shake in her voice so she’d know she’d gone too far with her hide-and-seek. Daisy cried as she circled the house twice, casting her sight everywhere, trying to look at every inch of every acre. “I’m so angry right now, Lenore,” she shouted, but she wasn’t. She was terrified. Elvis’s attention to Lenore took on a different tenor in her memory. I could just eat you up, he’d say, pinching her cheek. You deserve the best of everything, he’d say.