Keturah and Lord Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

we had finished, Grandmother reached out and stroked my hair. “Keturah, you must have no more adventures. It is unseemly for a girl of marriageable age. Eat—come, you must have more! Surely you have a high appetite after starving for three days.”
    But my appetite was satisfied, and I laid down my spoon.
    “Grandmother,” I asked after a time, “who commands Death? Is anyone greater than he?”
    She looked at me, puzzled, and then shook her head. “What thoughts you get, child!”
    “Tell me, Grandmother. If we do not speak of him, how will I know how to greet him, or what manner of address I should give him, and what my conversation should be when he comes to me?”
    She thought a moment, perhaps thinking of her daughter, her son-in-law, and her husband. “One is greater than death,” Grandmother said, “and that is life. For life will be, and work as he may, death must bow in the end to life. When death came for my daughter, life gave me you to comfort my heart. But hear me, child. People don’t like to hear death’ s name. If you are in polite company, he is not spoken of.”
    “But he has touched every one of us, Grandmother,” I said. “Who does not have a loved one that he has not robbed away? We should speak of him. He is to everyone familiar.”
    “Nevertheless.”
    I knew that word meant that she would speak no more about it. But I was not ready to end our talk. “Grandmother,” I said shyly, “what is love?”
    She looked steadily at me, as if trying to determine whether I was being impertinent. My question, however, was sincere, for though I knew what marriage was and how some loves looked and how babies came, still I did not know how love was supposed to feel.
    She said, “Do you not love the babies you tend while their mothers are afield?”
    “Yes,” I said, “but...”
    “It is all of a one, my dear, all of a one. There’s that baby who is loved, and then one day he loves so as to make another baby. Wear our souls out in love, we do, or looking for it.”
    She leaned closer to me. The color of Grandmother’s eyes was hard to tell, the sun had bleached them so, but they were quick and piercing.
    “Now I will tell you a true thing, child, and if you are wise you will remember it. The soul, it longs for its mate as much as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul. But if you would be happy all your days, as I was with your grandfather, subdue the body and marry the soul. Look for a soul-and-heart love.”
    A soul-and-heart love, I thought. Yes, that was what I would have, and I was minded of my urgency to see Soor Lily for a charm.
    I asked, “What chores today, Grandmother?”
    “Lass, everyone who came to mourn with me did chores enough to last a week. The women cleaned and washed, Ben Marshall cared for the garden, and Tailor did all my mending and tanned a fleece. Tobias did the yard, and Gretta and Beatrice did all the carding and spinning. Take the day for your own, child,” Grandmother said, “but go not one step into the forest. I won’t lose you again.”
    That command I wished with all my heart I could obey.

    I had two errands—to speak to John Temsland or his father, and to visit Soor Lily. While the latter was the easier to accomplish, it was the more dreaded.
    Soor Lily lived near the road to Marshall, a short way into the green gloom of the forest, with her seven great sons, each the size of two men, who loved her and obeyed her slavishly and would not leave her for a wife. Though the air was still as I entered the wood, leaves of the trees whispered and seemed to bend, as if they were a little more alive than other trees for living near Soor Lily.
    When I came to her house, I saw that the door was of oak and enormous, so that her boys, I supposed, might enter in without ducking, as they must do to enter any other house of the village. Not that they were often invited.
    As I stood nervously before the door, I saw two of her big boys peering from