An Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard Page A

he shared its glory’s rise as its trees fell. His family had crossed the plains in an emigrant train of wagons, andjoined in a raw settlement on Bellingham Bay. He saw the firs rise straight from the water’s edge a hundred feet without branching, and he cricked his neck to see their tops another hundred feet higher. He saw Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where Pacific water, deep and sheltered, made an inland sea. He saw the settlement called Whatcom spring up urgent to do business by cutting, floating, milling, and selling fir timber. Capitalizers drew into town and plunked down money. Their bold enterprises platted building lots, chopped trails through the forest, and flung out wharves.
    Now Whatcom County spread from the glaciated North Cascades to the inland sea. The state of Washington was three years old, bigger than all New England, and the coming magnificence of its Puget Sound harbors was plain to any man. Clare felt himself as immortal as the nation whose destiny, as he put it to himself, he shared; no moss grew under his feet. His was the first generation to rise in this wilderness, and some magnificence lay in store for it, and some unnameable heroism would be his. He would achieve, he would do, succor, conquer, succeed.
    He would enclose the front porch, extend another porch beyond it over the lilacs, and root more lilacs farther out. He and June would add to the family. They could pick up some beachfront land in the islands this summer, roll up a cabin, build a rowboat or buy a sloop, tour the islands, maybe keep bees.
    June lifted Mabel from Clare’s lap, balanced her on her legs, and led her upstairs. Ada soused the dishes. Clare sat at the dining-room table, alone. His vest hung open. Honor had come to him, and distinction, in a modest way, as it had come to the expanding town. He had served as county clerk, as city assessor. When he won the county clerkship, he passed out cigars. He purchased a topper. He knew that June regarded these honorable posts as thankless.
    There was sawdust, fine as powder, on his bare neck and sleeves. His thick dark hair rose every which way, and added two inches to his already exaggerated height. He disdained to comb, ever, this hair, for his mother had combed it too much when he was a boy. Every morning he parted his hair with hisfingers and pressed it down. By day he put on and took off his bicycle cap a hundred times, and by evening his hair stuck up.
    Clare could see, reflected in the dark window across the table, the yellow gas lamp floating and globular like a planet or star. Beneath it, and also floating over the outside dark, were reflections from the kitchen window behind him—which contained again, golden, the gas lamp, and his wife’s round head in motion—and Mabel near and spread pale along the darkness, and a cluster of vaporous teacups on the table, and a cold bottle of milk.
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    Clare heard the doorbell and walked through the parlor to answer it, surprised, thinking, “It must be midnight.”
    The big man, whom Clare recognized, ducked under the doorway to enter. He pushed into the parlor, blinked in the lamplight, and stopped abruptly in the middle of the room. The dark parlor furniture shrank; did Clare himself so occupy a room? Under his curved hat brim, Obenchain’s soft eyes looked muddy about the skin. Clare had no idea what Obenchain would do.
    He offered him some tea. “I’m sorry we’re plumb out of sherry.” As Clare spoke he shooed the yellow cat from the fringed sofa and picked up a doll, a painted doll, which had been standing on a flowered cushion. Clare started to seat himself to put his guest at ease, but rose again, uncertain, and stepped forward. He had seen a long-barreled revolver tucked in Obenchain’s pants.
    â€œWhat do you want?”
    Obenchain told him. He said, looking sideways at Clare and then idly at the tops of the lace parlor curtains, “I am going to kill