Free Journey by Patricia MacLachlan

Chapter One
              M Y GRANDFATHER is belly down in the meadow with his camera, taking a close-up of a cow pie. He has, in the weeks since Mama left, taken many photographs—one of our least trustworthy cow, Mary Louise, standing up to her hocks in meadow muck; one of my grandmother in the pantry, reading a book while bees, drawn to her currant wine, surround her head in a small halo; and many of himself, taken with the self-timer device he’s not yet figured out. The pictures of himself fascinate him. They line the back of the barn wall in a series of my grandfatherin flight, dressed in overalls, caught in the moment of entering the picture, or leaving it; some with grand dimwitted smiles, his hair flying; one of a long, work-worn hand stretched out gracefully, the only part of him able to make it into the frame before the camera clicks.
    Cat gave him the camera in one of her fits of cleanliness.
    “I’ve given up the camera,” she yelled, her head underneath the bed, unearthing her life. “I’ve given up the flute and most everything else. Including meat,” she said pointedly. “I have spent the entire afternoon looking into the eyes of a cow, and have become a vegetarian.”
    “Which cow?” asked my grandmother, not kidding.
    Cat gave her a quick look. Grandfather picked up Cat’s camera and peered through the lens.
    “You tired of this, Cat?”
    Cat sighed.
    “My pictures are so …” She waved her hand to the pile of pictures. “So …”
    “Boring,” Grandfather finished for her.
    I felt my face flush with anger, but Cat laughed.
    “Take it, Grandpa,” she said cheerfully.
    Grandfather turned to me.
    “Journey?”
    “No.”
    What did he think I’d take pictures of? This farm? I could close my eyes and see it—the spruce trees at the edge of the meadow, the stream cutting through, the stone walls that framed it all. I knew every inch of every acre. What would pictures tell me? And the people. What would pictures tell me of my grandmother, so secretive; my grandfather, tall and blunt?
    On Cat’s dresser was a picture of our father who had gone away somewhere a long time ago. He was young in the picture, laughing, his eyes looking past the camera, past the place, past me. When I was little, I carried that picture around, trying to remember him, trying to place the picture so that the eyes would look into mine. But they never did. His face was like carved stone, not flesh and blood. And the picture never told me the things I wanted to know.
    Did he think about Cat and me? Where was he? Would I know him if I saw him?
    I turned and the camera clicked: Grandfather’s first picture of me. I stared at him angrily, and slowly he lowered the camera and looked at me with a surprised and dismayed expression, as if he’d seen something through the lens that he hadn’t expected.
    Grandma’s voice broke the silence.
    “I’ll take the flute, Cat. And this.”
    Grandma had put on the sweatshirt that Mama had given Cat, LIDDIE written across the front in big letters.
    “No!” My voice sounded harsher than I meant. “That’s Mama’s shirt!”
    Grandfather put his hand on my shoulder.
    “Your mama left it, Journey.”
    I shook off his hand and stepped away from him.
    Grandma stood in the light of the window, her hair all tumbled like Mama’s in the barn. I looked at Cat to see if she noticed, but Cat was smiling at Grandma.
    “You look wonderful, Gran.”
    Cat pulled me after her and went to hugGrandma. And Grandfather took a picture that 6 would startle me every time I saw it: not Grandma, her hair tied back with a piece of string, smiling slightly as if she knew the secrets of the world; not Cat, her head thrown back, laughing; but my face, staring into the camera with such fury that even in the midst of the light and the laughter the focus of the picture is me.

Chapter Two
    The first letter that wasn’t a letter came in the noon mail. It lay in the middle of the kitchen table like a