Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

any of it.   Not how tall Lion was, or how handsome, or how singularly talented.   She had watched him as a baby in his cradle and had known then and there.   She had held his hand when he was a toddler and been certain of it.   Lion was meant for great things.   This certainty of who he was, the clarity of who he could be, made Violet love her eldest son all the more.   When George got up from the table, confused by advanced mathematics, calling himself an old dog who was long past the age of learning any new tricks, no matter how good a teacher Lion was, Violet waited for her husband to leave the room.   Then she sat down with Lion.   She let him teach her the solutions to some of the easier problems, and if mathematics didn’t come naturally to her, at least she understood bits of his language.   What he loved, she loved, whether it be numbers scrawled on a page, or hot apple pie; whether it be biology, astronomy, or green-pepper soup.   Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow.   When this happened, other people in the family couldn’t bring themselves to disturb them.   All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.
    The other children noticed the special connection between mother and son, but they didn’t resent Lion.   They felt sorry for him, as a matter of fact.   They might not have been as smart, but they weren’t fools. To be loved so intensely tied Lion up and freed them.   All the brothers and sisters understood this, and they acted accordingly.   Susanna, for instance, had no fear that she would break her mother’s heart when she married at seventeen.   George Jr.”   never much for books, knew no one would try to stop him when he left high school to work alongside his father as a fisherman.   There was a camaraderie among the children, a ring of good fellowship.   They liked games and challenges, ice hockey and relay races.   One June evening they had all decided to play tag in the woods after supper.   It was a warm summer night, and the fireflies were drifting through the woods.   The children, save for John, who was only eleven, were all too old for such games, which made them all the more enjoyable.
    Lion had come up the drive at this hour, thinking about his future.   He had graduated from high school, and had spent nearly two years working with his father on his boat, joined now by George Jr.   But then the idea of college had come up; perhaps Violet West had gone to the town council or perhaps the town council had come to her, the sequence of events wasn’t really clear.
    All the same, Lion seemed to be on the path to college.   He had just been to Town Hall, directed there by his teachers, especially Mr.   Grant, and by the mayor himself.   Lion was twenty, a bit old to start college; still, he had applied for the fellowship to Harvard.   He knew that Jack Crosby was shifty, that he’d taken over some of the older fishermen’s oyster beds at a fraction of their worth.   Crosby was said to disdain shellfish as disgusting and unnatural, choosing to serve only beef for dinner at his house on Beacon Hill.   Whatever he was, Lion considered himself to be a fisherman’s son first and foremost, and he carried a fisherman’s resentment of the bosses who seemed to be taking over the industry.   At the very last minute, as Lion stood there in Town Hall, told he’d be a shoo-in for the fellowship, he’d taken his application and folded it into his pocket.   He’d have to think about it some more, he told the town officials.   He’d need a little more time.
    Lion was considering his future as he walked toward the house on the June night when his brothers and sisters were playing tag.   Could he really leave home?   Could he be elsewhere when the red pears ripened, when his father chopped ice in the winter, when they took their boat out on the bay in the early