Blackbird House Read Online Free PDF Page A

the flies.   The awful thing was that Ruth wasn’t completely opposed to being sold.   She didn’t want to think.   She didn’t want to remember anything.   She didn’t even want to speak.
    They reached the farm that Lysander had bought from the Hadley family.
    He’d purchased the property mainly because it was the one place in the
    area from which there was no view of the sea, for that was exactly what
    he wanted.   The farm was only a mile from the closest shore, but it sat
    in a hollow, with tall oaks and scrub pine and a field of sweet peas
    and brambles nearby.   As a younger man,
    Lysander had been a sailor, he’d gone out with the neighbors to the Great Banks, and it was there he’d had his accident.   A storm had come up suddenly, and the sloop had listed madly, throwing Lysander into the sea.   It was so cold he had no time to think, save for a fleeting thought of Jonah, of how a man could be saved when he least expected it, in ways he could have never imagined.
    He wondered if perhaps the other men on board, Joseph Hansen and Edward West, had had the foresight to throw him a side of salt pork for him to lean on, for, just when he expected to drown, something solid was suddenly beneath him.   Something hard and cold as ice.   Something made of scales rather than flesh or water or wood; a creature who certainly was not intent on Lysander’s salvation.   The fish to whose back he clung was a halibut, a huge one two hundred, maybe three hundred pounds, Edward West later said.   Lysander rode the halibut like he rode his horse, Domino, until he was bucked off.   All at once his strength was renewed by his panic; he started swimming, harder than he ever had before.   Lysander was almost to the boat when he felt it, the slash of the thing against him, and the water turned red right away.   He was only twenty at the time, too young to have this happen.   Dead or alive, either would have been better than what had befallen him.   He wished he had drowned that day, because when he was hauled into the boat his neighbors had to finish the job and cut off the leg at the thigh, then cauterize the wound with gunpowder and whiskey.
    Lysander had some money saved, and the other men in town contributed the rest, and the farm was bought soon after.   The shed was built in a single afternoon, and the anvil brought down from Boston.   Luckily, Lysander had the blacksmith’s trade in his family on his father’s side, so it came naturally to him.   The hotter the work was, the better he liked it.   He could stick his hand into the flame fueled by the bellow and not feel a thing.   But let it rain, even a fleeting drizzle, and he would start to shiver.   He ignored the pond behind the house entirely, though there were catfish there that were said to be delectable.   Fishing was for other men.   Water was for fools.   As for women, they were a dream he didn’t bother with.   In his estimation, the future was no farther away than the darkness of evening; it consisted of nothing more than a sprinkling of stars in the sky.
    Lysander used a crutch made of apple wood that bent when he leaned upon
    it but was surprisingly strong when need be.   He had hit a prowling
    skunk on the head with the crutch and knocked it unconscious.   He had
    dug through a mat of moss for a wild orchid that smelled like fire when
    he held it up to his face.   He slept with the crutch by his side in
    bed, afraid to be without it.   He liked to walk in the woods, and
    sometimes he imagined he would be better off if he just lay down
    between the logs and the moss and
    stayed there, forevermore.   Then someone would need their horse shod; they would come up the road and ring the bell that hung on the wall of the shed, and Lysander would have to scramble back from the woods.   But he thought about remaining where he was, hidden, unmoving; he imagined it more often than anyone might have guessed.   Crows would light upon his