Free The Hour of Lead by Bruce Holbert Page A

understood, though he did not, and he wondered if Alfred, too, was perplexed by his own words, as if the tongue of this strange god had entered his mouth without the sense in his head to stand between. The long nights that followed, Matt considered his own mind, which seemed, opposed to Alfred’s, all thoughts and no words, though they did eventually move him, as he lumbered through December and January, idle as seed beneath the snow.
    At the north edge of Peach a towering knoll rose out of an otherwise level alfalfa pasture belonging to the grocer. Wendy and her sisters swathed the field summers to fodder the delivery nags the grocer drove twice weekly to service the invalids and bachelors who’d quit on town for one reason or another. Straw and dirt had accumulated under the rocky promontory until it looked a part of the country, but Mrs. Jefferson had told the class a volcano near the ocean had spewed it across the state. February, when the Chinooks began to loosen winter, Matt ended a horse ride at the place. He tethered his mare to the spindly locust behind and hiked to the crest. There, he tucked himself behind the sharp-edged rock.
    He let his mind unspool once more that evening, waiting for truths he suddenly felt he required. Swimming below him was the town, all light and motion. Horse hooves splashed the damp streets and children darted in and out of the house glows like birds in the dawn. Full dark, he heard a mother call and then another. An hour past, the lights slipped out. A couple spooning on a porch split thequiet with a laugh, but the night stitched it over like something he’d dreamt.
    From his knoll, he saw the pendulum Wendy’s arm made when she swept a broom or the rock of one of her legs crossing the other while she read. He became almost giddy with her and, when the light of her window turned the lawn lemony and warm-looking after all the other lights had been blown dark, he crept to the edge of her window’s glow on the lawn and put one hand inside it, then one leg, and studied himself lit. Finally, he dared to get his whole body aglow and felt weightless and bold, like he might just walk to the door and knock, until he heard a chair shift inside and dove into the well of a raspberry thicket.

8
    F OR YEARS , L INDA J EFFERSON HAD watched parents hunt themselves in their little ones. Pawing mothers and distant fathers both hunting some track that would lead them back to themselves. They would say to their children “You’ve become a little man,” or “the boys will be calling soon.” These were one-sided conversations. Children did not answer such silliness. Of course they would turn men; of course boys would call for the girls. It was inevitable as the next daybreak. The children recognized their awkward arms and high water pant legs and new hairy places were nothing except natural. Their parents, though, seemed shocked at such developments. Soon the children realized that when adults spoke about their growth in such a manner, it was in the same bewildered tone they saved for death, which, also, they did not understand.
    Poplar trees on her property had grown twelve feet in her lifetime, and, in a field behind her house, the wind had flung pollen and seeds, and the bees hovered over them summers, and the deer and an occasional elk browsed the grasses and dropped pellets, and rainturned their leavings grit, and the grit fed the seeds, and the sun shone, and the clouds rained, until she had seen a patch become a meadow, and, finally, strained by the years and thinned with daily, mundane duties, her tragedies, too, seemed to turn natural.
    She drew no comfort with seraphim and a heavenly patron. People who believed in such absurdity in her opinion lacked education and the fortitude to face a future of their own making. However, she fancied herself too possessed by the muses to heed Darwin, whom she found dull and brutal, as she did most science: an appropriate