The Seeker A Novel (R. B. Chesterton) Read Online Free PDF

took me a moment to realize there were no tracks leading to her. It was as if she’d been dropped from the sky.
    Barbie in a ballgown. I glanced around to see if someone might be playing a prank. The doll, sitting atop the snow, couldn’t have been out there for long. She was pristine.
    Had I once had a doll like that? I tried to remember, but dredging the past brought other things up from the muck of memory. I’d successfully buried so much of my childhood. Selective memory. That was how I’d managed to deal with my family. Too many bad memories like the death of black-haired, blue-eyed Uncle Mike, my father’s youngest brother, blasted almost in half by a rival oxy dealer with a sawed-off 12-gauge on the side of a backwoods road.
    Once the past began to uncoil, I couldn’t stop it. I tried not to remember the still ticking of the hallway clock as my mother died. My father’s sobs and pleadings with her to stay, not to leave. The red splotch of blood that soaked his white shirt and left a permanent stain in the heart-of-pine floor around the chair where she sat.
    I’d played with dolls. I was sure of it, though I couldn’t pin down an exact memory. Maybe a blond-haired Barbie like the one that lay in the snow. Easing down the lip of the bank, I moved cautiously toward the doll. The snow covered a multitude of hazards—holes, branches, undergrowth. A wrong move could mean a sprained ankle or worse.
    At last I reached the Barbie and picked her up. Her dress was barely damp from the snow. She wore a blue gown with a white net overlay that glittered. Snow Queen Barbie. On her perpetually pointed feet were silver sandals, and over her arm was a white fur wrap. Elegant. A fantasy figure for a young girl.
    But there was no girl. And no footprints. Just Barbie. I laid her back in the snow and turned to leave. My bootprints were deep and irregular. Impulsively, I picked up the doll again and tucked her into my pocket. It seemed wrong to leave her in the freezing snow.
    Back at the cabin, I picked up my well-worn copy of Thoreau’s Walden and read from it again. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
    There was no doubt Thoreau’s intention was a solitary pursuit of life’s meaning. But fate handed him something else entirely. A time of intimacy and shared love. It ended much too soon. And in ending, it had stolen Bonnie’s life.
    What is the cost of love? Is it worth the price that must be paid?
    A sharp knock at the door made me drop my pen. I got up to discover Patrick standing on my doorstep, his handsome face flushed with cold. “Dorothea told me to ask if you’ll be at dinner tonight.”
    I recognized a lie when I heard it, but I motioned him inside. The thought of tackling Thoreau’s great work of solitude and turning it inside out loomed too large on such a cold day. Patrick would be a smashing distraction.
    “Would you like a cup of cocoa?” I had fresh milk and sugar and chocolate. The tiny kitchenette held a two-burner stove where I could heat things.
    “With some rum?” he moved an old rocker from the corner and plopped down in front of the banked fire. “You need another log. It’s about to go out.” He threw wood on the fire