The Daughter of Odren Read Online Free PDF

and Hovy all in the house here tonight. And when evening comes, I’ll do what I must do.”
    She stood still. She looked at her brother full in the face for a while, then past him at the hill that rose above the farmyard. The dry grass was the color of amber in the afternoon sunlight. A few sheep grazed up near the oak-grove at the crest.
    â€œAll these years,” she said—“no, hear me, Clay—I’ve thought and thought how it was and how it must be. Sometimes thinking gets to be like seeing. I see Father at table in our hall that night he came home, laughing, holding me, holding you to him. Then I see Ash lying across my house floor face down and his blood spreading out like spilled washwater. Then sometimes it all goes thin, like a fog or a wisp of veiling, the farm and the hills and the people, it all fades into the sunlight, and I see strange things. I see the valleys all covered with stones and great houses and crowds and crowds of people, no farms or sheep or anything at all but the faces of people everywhere, and they speak but I can’t understand them, and none of them see me though I’m there among them, but they pass and pass and pass not seeing, and their voices are a roar like the sea, and there are great lights among them, flashing and blinding, and still there are more of them, more of them. And I tell myself, the hills are there, the farms are there, they must be, they’ve always been, and as I say it the blind people begin to fade away, and I come back here at last and hear the little sounds of the animals and birds in the stillness, and the leaves in the wind. And then for a while my thoughts about Father and Mother and how to destroy Ash all shrink away and leave me in peace. But at night they come back. And I think, how many times must this happen?” She fell silent.
    Clay, puzzled, impatient, half listening, said nothing.
    Bees hummed around the red bean-flowers in the kitchen garden, and the leaves of the willows by the farmhouse stirred.
    â€œWell, then,” he said, “this evening I go to the Standing Man.”
    For a while she did not speak. “Go in the morning,” she said, her voice soft, defeated. “Before light. I go there every morning. I take food and water to Father. Ash knows it. He came once years ago to watch me. He laughed and went away. He won’t be there, though. They sleep late at Odren. It would be better in the morning.”
    Clay resisted, pondered, and at last said, “I’ll stay the night here, then.”
    His sister nodded and turned toward the house.
    Â 
    The fog crept low on the fields in the darkness at about waist height. The lantern Weed carried swung above it sometimes, illuminating the ragged, pale surface around like a dim circle of foam or snow. Where the fog rose higher the light shrank into a misty sphere. Clay had told her not to bring the lantern, but she said, “Best to do as I always do,” and lighted the candle in the lantern of brass and horn. She went first, unhesitant. Her brother followed, sometimes stumbling or pausing to get his footing on ploughland or uneven pasture ground. The glow of the lantern descended before him. He followed it, feeling his way. They came into the small valley and to the standing stone.
    â€œPut it out,” he whispered.
    She blew out the light. The fog seemed to darken, then lighten around them. Sky and air were paling to grey. It was silent except for the pulse of the sea below the cliffs.
    She stood still, at some distance from the stone. Her brother was also motionless. After a long time she murmured, “It’s getting on to day.”
    After a time she heard his voice, very low at first. At the sound of the words the hair on her head moved, her whole body shuddered. She stood with her hands clenched, following the spell with all her being, willing it to take hold, to open the stone. Her lips moved silently: “Father, Father, Father