Free The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye Page A

stop the physical work and resort to culling the catalogs, to his drawings and plans. He'd redraw the lines, up the sheer, recalculate the amount of lumber he was going to need, the barrels of oakum; double-check the weight of the motor he was considering against the strength of the motor box he had planned. All of these things raised in him an apprehension that was redoubled by the uncertainty of seeing her.
       The waiting gave him a feeling deep inside. It was not heartache or longing but rather a definite pain, a throbbing in his bones. Some mornings he'd wake from his few fitful hours of sleep hardly able to walk. He'd brew a pot of coffee and stand at the counter scratching his beard, considering the boat. Considering his achy bones. He knew these first strips of wood were the most important, and the thought of his own life at the mercy of his workmanship filled him with doubt. On one such morning, after three nights without Rebekah, he decided to visit Hosea to see what he could learn about bones.
       As a boy he'd been forbidden to enter certain rooms at the apothecary. Hosea's bedroom on the third floor was off limits, as were his offices on the second floor. There were doors with padlocks on them in the basement, rooms he knew now as the storage cellars for the hooch. Even Rebekah— so wont to disobey Hosea, so quick to conspire with Odd— was firm on the banishment.
       But even as he'd been forbidden entrance, Odd had been a young boy left often to his own devices and full of a child's inquisitiveness. He'd made his romps through the apothecary governed by his curiosity, reveling in his cunning more than the discoveries made. The room Odd thought of now was Grimm's medical office. He wanted to see the skeleton that stood in the corner.
       When he entered the apothecary on that August morning it was a place bustling with customers. By then Hosea was peddling garments and dry goods along with his cures, and the townsfolk were out in force. The Lund boy was behind the cash register in an apron to match Hosea's, Rebekah nowhere to be seen.
       When finally there was a lull, Hosea met Odd at the counter. "Hello, young man," he said. "Business is brisk. It is indeed."
       "I see that," Odd said.
       "I'm a fool for not introducing this line of clothes sooner."
    "They're in a frenzy for them, sure enough."
       Hosea took a moment to delight in his savvy, then turned his attention back to Odd. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
       "I'm wanting to learn about bone disease."
       "Bone disease?"
       "Yup."
       "As in diseases of the human skeleton? That sort of bone disease."
       "That sort."
       "Why? Are you not well?"
       "I'm fine. Curious is all."
       "Well," Hosea began, lapsing into a fatherly role that had never once suited him, "there are many diseases that afflict bone and marrow alike. Jean George Chrétien Frédéric Martin Lobstein was a professor and pathologist at École d'obstétrique du Rhin inférieur. He discovered the root causes of osteoporosis. Brittle bones, essentially. There are cancers of the bone marrow. Rickets, of course. And—"
       "What about that skeleton up in your office?" Odd interrupted. "That bunch of bones have any disease?"
       "Why, no, of course not."
       "Can I go up and have a look at it?"
       "Why so curious about bones in an attic?"
       "I just want to see the skeleton."
       Hosea looked around the shop, told the Lund boy he'd be back in a moment, and led Odd up the hidden staircase behind the wall of shelves above the counter.
       Upstairs, he took a key from above the door frame and unlocked the door. "We don't often venture into these quarters anymore," Hosea said. The room was windowless, hot and close, dark but for what light followed them in from the hallway.
       It was hard to see at first, but everything in the room was covered with white bed linens. As Hosea went from object to object removing the