Ernie's Ark Read Online Free PDF Page B

a half hour away; how much damage can she arrange in half an hour? I remain for a moment in the bracing wintry breath of this autumn day, wishing I’d become a weatherman back when I still had choices. To watch the sky and know what it means would be a magical talent indeed.
    I open the passenger door. “‘I shall be telling this with a sigh,’” I say, summoning once again the Frost poem I’ve committed to memory.
    My daughter stares ahead. “I heard you the first time.”
    I settle into the passenger side, and here’s a surprise: it’s comfortable. I adjust the seat, working the controls until I feel strangely off my feet. Just as I remember the salesman’s description of this seat’s having a “cradle setting,” my daughter begins to sing.
    This I had forgotten. This I had completely forgotten, that my daughter has the voice of a fallen angel, vocal cords made of silk and smoke. And I think again of my daughter’s notion of ancestry, of handed-down sorrow. Could she believe I exist someplace in those shadowy notes, that whatever operates the heart-lifting thrumof her throat might hail in part from some veiled, sorrowful part of me? She is singing something from church, I believe, a Negro spiritual, not one of the well-known ones, the type of music designed to make committed pagans fall to their knees. An old feeling falls over me, something I had nearly forgotten, and that feeling is surrender. I do not mean the type of surrender that marked my confusing jig-and-reel through childhood to the drum-beat of my parents’ square-shouldered righteousness. That was a surrender of the sort I could overpower, given enough time in the world. No, this is another feeling altogether, reminiscent of seeing a newborn girl, a fearsome melting as you hold her harmless, quivering weight. A terrible dwindling, a long, terrible glance back at who you were just ten minutes ago, before this small, smeared, squalling mass of girl slipped into the waiting world. Her first note, that vocal emanation of outrage, had traces of the vibrato I hear now. The devastating sweetness of it, like warm milk poured from a pan, overtakes me, and the day seems to haze over as a low, protecting cloud. As the fall-blazing trees begin to thicken at the roadsides and the car smoothes us over roads that begin to curve and wind, her words dim, the notes run together, and I am hers, I am helpless before her, and the car fills with an ambiguous, beautiful noise that despite my desire to be led elsewhere, anywhere, leads me harmlessly into sleep.
    When I wake, I ask her where we are, surprised by the feeling of being in her hands—of being in any woman’s hands, of being at the mercy. My silver-throated captor closes her lips and keeps driving. The weather has shifted mightily, the temperature up fifteen degrees, a low, dense sky with unnerving shrouds of fogmoving in and out of our sight. Through the haze I recognize the shirred ridges of evergreens, the crimson-and-gold hills that slope into a valley, the smokestacks chuffing at the valley’s heart. We’re in Abbott Falls, Maine, yes sir, home of Atlantic Pulp & Paper’s northernmost mill. I’ve been here twice in eight months, and have yet to experience an unguarded moment within its leafy borders. It looks a lot like the town I grew up in, which I suppose my daughter knows. We cruise up and down the glum streets, past listing roofs and hopeful squares of lawn on which rain-spotted FOR SALE signs stand like hostesses at a bad restaurant. “This was your plan all along?” I ask her.
    “No,” she says, easing my car down one humble street after another. “The plan was to hole up in a B&B, admire some foliage, and figure out how we got to the point where you couldn’t be bothered to fly back for my mother’s funeral.”
    “You told me it was all right, Emily,” I say, and her name clangs in this troubled northern air. Emily. It sounds foreign and untried. “Emily, you gave me