Galilee Read Online Free PDF Page B

toward me. In truth, I hadn’t believed she felt it toward anybody.
    â€œSo the business about the Gearys—?”
    â€œMust go in. All of it. Every last detail. Don’t spare any of them. Or any of us, come to that. We’ve all made our compromises over the years. Traded with the enemy instead of stopping their hearts.”
    â€œDo you hate the Gearys?”
    â€œ I should say no. They’re only human. They know no better. But yes, I hate them. If they didn’t exist I’d still have a husband and a son.”
    â€œIt’s not as though Galilee’s dead.”
    â€œHe’s dead to me,” she said. “He died the moment he sided with them against your father.” She snapped her fingers lightly, and her quill-pig turned round and waddled back to her. Throughout this entire conversation I’d seen only glimpses of her, but now, as the porcupine approached her, she bent down to gather it up into her arms, and the moonlight, washing up off the boards, momentarily showed me her entirely. She was not, as Marietta had reported, frail or sickly; far from it. She looked like a young woman to my eye; a woman prodigiously gifted by nature: her beauty both refined and raw at the same time, the planes of her face so strong she seemed almost the idol of herself, carved out of the silver light in which she stood. Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman’s face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with
words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before.
    With the quill-pig in her arms, she was moving toward the door. But as she reached it she halted (all this I only heard; she was again invisible to me).
    â€œThe beginning is always the hardest,” she said.
    â€œWell actually I’ve already begun . . .” I said, a little tentatively. Despite the fact that she’d neither said nor done anything to intimidate me, I was still—perhaps unfairly—anxious that she’d blindside me with some attack or other.
    â€œHow?” she said.
    â€œHow did I begin?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWith the house, of course.”
    â€œAh . . .” I heard the smile in her voice. “With Mr. Jefferson?”
    â€œWith Mr. Jefferson.”
    â€œThat was a good idea. To begin in the middle that way. And with my glorious Thomas. He was, you know, the love of my life.”
    â€œJefferson?”
    â€œYou think it should have been your father?”
    â€œWell—”
    â€œIt was nothing like love with your father. It became love, but that’s not how it began. When such as I, and such as he, mate, we do not mate for the sake of sentiment. We mate to make children. To preserve our genius, as your father would have said.”
    â€œPerhaps I should have begun there.”
    She laughed. “With our mating?”
    â€œNo I didn’t mean that.” I was glad of the darkness, to cover my blushes—though with her eyes she probably saw them anyway. “I . . . I . . . meant with the firstborn. With Galilee.”
    I heard her sigh. Then I heard nothing; for such a time I thought perhaps she’d decided to leave me. But no. She was still there in the room.
    â€œWe didn’t baptize him Galilee,” she said. “He took that name for himself, when he was six.”
    â€œI didn’t know that.”
    â€œThere’s a great deal you don’t know, Maddox. A great deal you can’t even guess. That’s why I came to invite you . . . when you’re ready . . . to see some of the past . . .”
    â€œYou have more books?”
    â€œNot books. Nothing so tangible . . . ”
    â€œI’m