Love and Sleep Read Online Free PDF

departing, got you at least. “The spool bed."
    "Did Axel send them on?” Winnie wondered. “I guess he must have, because they were all there later on, weren't they? Sure they were. Well, I was in a state, I know it."
    Pierce never blamed Winnie for his exile. Of Axel his father he had been deeply, inarticulately ashamed; on those nights when Axel called to talk to him, he would listen almost without speaking to Axel's anyway unbreakable stream of sentiments (always a sound in the background of these calls, a tinkle and sea-murmur of voices and music) which inevitably grew maudlin, sorry, filled with moist pauses, while the Oliphants watched and Pierce's cheeks grew hot. But he didn't blame Axel for what had become of him either, because Winnie didn't or didn't seem to. She never complained of Axel; she seemed to bear him no grudge; she rarely spoke of him at all. Maybe it was because Winnie was able not to notice things, because she sought so diligently for a space of rest for herself untouched by the consequences of things, maybe because she loved Pierce so much and never questioned him either, that Pierce had always found in her room not the reasons for his exile but a respite from it.
    Take care of your mother, Axel had commissioned him, his words drowned in tears, that last morning in Brooklyn before Pierce set out with Winnie, in a cab filled with their swollen suitcases, toward the bus station. Be a good knight, he had said.
    Be a good knight. Axel, quixotic lover of romances, chivalry, and vows of service, had also suffered a quixotic harm to the brain from them. Pierce in Kentucky remembered his injunction, but he didn't feel burdened by it, not then anyway. Axel grew dim to Pierce in Kentucky, insubstantial, which judging from Winnie's behavior he was supposed to do, evaporate, melt into nothing like a snowman in the advancing of Pierce's seasons. But Pierce was his mother's knight, and would remain; she had rescued him from the dark wood of the Brooklyn apartment where his father was lost (Why dark? Why lost?) and now she was his alone, installed over in the upper story of the main house, in the bedroom next to Sam's. There he served her, there he waited on her, laughed with her, capered before her; he poured himself endlessly into the vacancy that was her, teasing her with questions that would last forever because they had no answers: What if everything suddenly got twice as big as it is? Could you tell? What if the stars are really small and close overhead, just a little ways, a thousand miles, and only seem to be far away? What if seeming-to-be-far-away is just the way they are, and you could really reach them easily in a jet? Why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead? Why is there space? Why is there anything, anything at all, and not just nothing?
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    Three
    Autumn rains slaked the ash of the hillside and the holler; for a long time the smell of things burned and then wetted reached the nose on every wind, but more cold rain washed the air. In spring the burnt-over land would only be the more fertile because of the rich ash the children had laid on it; burning and then planting, after all, was how Cumberland crops had long been grown. Pierce turned a leaf of Collier's magazine and saw an ad for the Plywood Association: an emerald sprout of fir, sheltered like a flame by rough caring hands, first growth of a new forest in the colorless blasted land all around.
    The school year hadn't yet started for the Oliphants. Every autumn since they had come school had started late, and this year Father Midnight's sister, who had been the children's tutor, went away to a distant hospital just as the process of setting up school in the kitchen and sitting room of the little bungalow was to begin. What sort of hospital she went away to, and for what reason, wasn't described to the children, which left them free to imagine reasons and outcomes more drastic