Lucy: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Those thoughts would have come as a complete surprise to my mother, for in her life she had found that her ways were the best ways to have, and she would have been mystified as to how someone who came from inside her would want to be anyone different from her. I did not have an answer to this myself. But there it was. Thoughts like these had brought me to be sitting on the edge of a Great Lake with a woman who wanted to show me her world and hoped that I would like it, too. Sometimes there is no escape, but often the effort of trying will do quite nicely for a while.
    I was sitting on the veranda one day with these thoughts when I saw Mariah come up the path, holding in her hands six grayish-blackish fish. She said, “Taa-daah! Trout!” and made a big sweep with her hands, holding the fish up in the light, so that rainbowlike colors shone on their scales. She sang out, “I will make you fishers of men,” and danced around me. After she stopped, she said, “Aren’t they beautiful? Gus and I went out in my old boat—my very, very old boat—and we caught them. My fish. This is supper. Let’s go feed the minions.”
    It’s possible that what she really said was “millions,” not “minions.” Certainly she said it in jest. But as we were cooking the fish, I was thinking about it. “Minions.” A word like that would haunt someone like me; the place where I came from was a dominion of someplace else. I became so taken with the word “dominion” that I told Mariah this story: When I was about five years old or so, I had read to me for the first time the story of Jesus Christ feeding the multitudes with seven loaves and a few fishes. After my mother had finished reading this to me, I said to her, “But how did Jesus serve the fish? boiled or fried?” This made my mother look at me in amazement and shake her head. She then told everybody she met what I had said, and they would shake their heads and say, “What a child!” It wasn’t really such an unusual question. In the place where I grew up, many people earned their living by being fishermen. Often, after a fisherman came in from sea and had distributed most of his fish to people with whom he had such an arrangement, he might save some of them, clean and season them, and build a fire, and he and his wife would fry them at the seashore and put them up for sale. It was quite a nice thing to sit on the sand under a tree, seeking refuge from the hot sun, and eat a perfectly fried fish as you took in the view of the beautiful blue sea, former home of the thing you were eating. When I had inquired about the way the fish were served with the loaves, to myself I had thought, Not only would the multitudes be pleased to have something to eat, not only would they marvel at the miracle of turning so little into so much, but they might go on to pass a judgment on the way the food tasted. I know it would have mattered to me. In our house, we all preferred boiled fish. It was a pity that the people who recorded their life with Christ never mentioned this small detail, a detail that would have meant a lot to me.
    When I finished telling Mariah this, she looked at me, and her blue eyes (which I would have found beautiful even if I hadn’t read millions of books in which blue eyes were always accompanied by the word “beautiful”) grew dim as she slowly closed the lids over them, then bright again as she opened them wide and then wider.
    A silence fell between us; it was a deep silence, but not too thick and not too black. Through it we could hear the clink of the cooking utensils as we cooked the fish Mariah’s way, under flames in the oven, a way I did not like. And we could hear the children in the distance screaming—in pain or pleasure, I could not tell.
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    Mariah and I were saying good night to each other the way we always did, with a hug and a kiss, but this time we did it as if we both wished we hadn’t gotten such a custom started. She was almost out