stood by the stove in one of the full white aprons she had made from flour sacks. All of them turned to him in a silence that seemed to spread from the deep shaft of sunlight through which the girl watched him. “You must be Billy,” the man said, and Emma, stripping off her apron, said, “Come and have a scone.”
Pulling out a chair, Billy sat beside the girl. Across the table, the man in the plaid shirt winked at him, as if sharing a secret, took a pull on his cigarette, and with slitted eyes expelled smoke that floated toward the ceiling andhung there, like the bough of some blue, spreading tree. The girl’s hand reached out, took up a scone, and withdrew.
After a while the man – her father? – suggested the two of them go outside and play. The girl got up immediately, and when Billy did not move, she turned at the door and sang back to him, “You coming?” In a trance, he followed. Years later, she would tell him: “You were such an odd boy. You would hardly say a word. I was starting to wonder if you were mental!”
He would tell her he was terrified.
“Of what!” she would say, delighted. More than three decades later, he still does not know, though he can recall the sudden lightness of his body as he followed her into the sun. She wore a pink T-shirt and shorts, and when they stopped by the water, she looked at him with a directness he had never experienced from anyone, as if she had no shame, no fear, no notion of what might happen (what would happen?) if you looked at someone too long.
“My father owns a lumberyard,” she said, as if setting out an object for his inspection. Her shoes and socks were white; there was a bandage below her knee. “What grade are you in?”
He could scarcely remember what “grade” was.
“Can you talk?”
He nodded.
“So say something.”
“I go trapping,” he managed, in a voice he hardly recognized – his answer to her comment about her father. Since he did not have a father, what emerged was that he went trapping, though it was Matt who handled the traps. But he had helped Matt pull the drowned bodies of the beaver from under the ice, helped rub them with snow, and he had ridden on the sled as the dogs ran panting for home. Trapping – it was the most important and precious fact he could offer her.
She went on studying him, amused, it seemed, by his answer, or by his inability to say more. Then at once, her hands flashed out – he found himself sitting on the ground. She had run off, but she soon turned to contemplate him. “So chase me!” she demanded. “Don’t you know anything ?”
He chased her: along the rock, across a sandy beach, up a narrow trail between boulders to a clearing where lush, flattened grass grew. While he stood hesitating, she flung herself down. The grass, he knew, hid pieces of glass where people had smashed bottles: here and there the shards stuck up like brown knives. “Sit next to me,” she told him, patting the ground. Warily, he crossed to her and sat.
On their backs, they watched the high clouds that made their way in from the lake and seemed, directly overhead, to form the banks of a deep white canyon with the blue sky at its bottom. An osprey slowly circled, and in the warm air above their faces a moth went fluttering by. He hardly dared moved. He felt he had arrived in a place that was so precarious it might vanish at any moment, like when the sun made a trembling, golden map on the panelling at the foot of his bed; or when he opened Adventures of Olden Times and – moments before his teacher took the book away – found (as he never found again) the picture ofSt. George on his horse, tilting his lance as he galloped toward the dragon with its pine-cone scales.
When she gasped, he sat bolt upright, as she had, and stared, as she was staring, at her open hand. A thick red worm was oozing from her palm.
Meeting her terrified gaze, he seemed to see her for the first time. Her lips, pulled taut, revealed a gap between her
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