Free Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson Page B

I continued to pull although she followed unresistingly, pausing only to lift down her bag of bricks from the dresser as we passed. I pulled her all the way up the stairs and through the bedroom door. Lucille stood bent over the candle with her hands cupped around the flame. Nevertheless it went out. “That was the last match,” she said.
    “It’s your turn to go downstairs,” I said. “Get a coal from the stove to light it with.” Lucille went and stood on the stairs for a long time.
    “I’ll go, Lucille,” Sylvie said.
    Lucille almost ran down the stairs. We heard the slish and moil of her steps in the hall and kitchen, and the business at the stove. She came back upstairs holding a coal in a china cup. I held the wick against it and blew, and the room was light again. Sylvie walked over to the vanity. The cards were dealt for a third hand. “You started without me,” she said. We put bricks on the floor for our feet and wrapped ourselves in quilts and played gin rummy.
    During those days Fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, “That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate’s wife dreamed her dream,” the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them. Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. But then suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the waterslid away from the land, and Fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud.
    The restoration of the town was an exemplary community effort in which we had no part. My grandmother had been rather isolated because she had no interest in people younger than herself. We and the paperboy were the only people under sixty to whom she was consistently polite. Lily and Nona, of course, had had little contact with local society, and Sylvie claimed not to know anybody in Fingerbone at all. Now and then she would say that someone on the street resembled So-and-so, was just the right height and the right age, but she was content simply to marvel at the resemblance. Then, too, for whatever reasons, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. That we were self-sufficient, our house reminded us always. If its fenestration was random, if its corners were out of square, my grandfather had built it himself, knowing nothing whatever of carpentry. And he had had the good judgment to set it on a hill, so while others were pushing drowned mattresses out second-story windows, we simply spooled up our living-room rug and propped it on the porch steps. (The couch and chairs were imponderably heavy, so we stuffed rags under them and left them to drip for a week or so.) We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, though somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent aswe were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter