Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman Page A

mornings as the fog was closing in to make the whole world seem made of clouds?
    Lion could hear laughter weaving around trees as he neared the house, and several shouts of surprise from deep in the woods.   Though the dark had fallen in sooty waves, he could narrow his eyes and make out several familiar figures.   There was his sister Huley, in her favorite gray dress, running to hide in the barn, and Gemma, easy enough to spy with her red hair.   There was poor John, tapped to be It, traipsing through the woods after his older brothers and sisters, doing his best, but never quite catching up.   Hundreds of fireflies were rising from their resting places in the tall grass, the males burning yellow with desire.   The summer constellations were appearing in the dome above them: Libra in the west; Ursa Major, the she-bear, in the northern sky;
    Virgo, the goddess, always watchful.
    Lion stood there for a moment, gulping down the sweetness in the air.   He realized that, although he heard his brothers and sisters shouting as they ran through the woods, he couldn’t understand a single word they were saying.   Here he was, at the age of twenty, a man with extraordinary talents, and yet he felt like crying.   He wanted to be just like the rest of them.   He wished for it desperately.
    Violet found the application in his pocket on washday.   She took it out, unfolded the paper, read it twice, then put it on top of the bureau in her bedroom.
    “He filled it out, but he didn’t turn it in,” she told George when he came to undress.
    “Maybe he doesn’t want to go.”
    George got in bed beside his wife.   They had been married for twenty years, enough time for him to know that, although her back was to him, she wanted to talk about this.   George slipped his arms around her waist.   His love for her felt heavy in his chest.
    “He’s meant to go,” Violet said.   “How could anyone not want to go to Harvard?”
    George West had salt on his skin no matter how often or how thoroughly he washed.   He thought about how he’d always wanted Violet, even before she’d ever bothered to look at him, how he’d admired the way her mind worked.
    “I wouldn’t want to,” he said.
    Violet turned round to face him.   The room was dark, but she could see him perfectly well.
    “Do you ever think about it?”   She didn’t like to bring up the subject, and she knew George liked it even less.   There’d been another man before him, Lion’s father.   It had all been a wretched mistake, except for the outcome, which Violet had never regretted, not ever, not once.
    “Never,” George told her.
    “How could you not?”   As for Violet, she thought about it every day, even after twenty years.
    George laughed.   “I think about fish.   I think about you.”
    “No you don’t.”   Violet laughed.   When she laughed she sounded like a girl again, but then she started crying.   She tried to hide it, she turned away; all the same, George knew.
    “I’ll talk to him,” George said.   “He’s my son.”
    It was a few days before George could manage to get Lion alone.   Since George Jr.   was now fishing with them, the boat was no good.   The house was too crowded, the days were growing shorter, and so George asked Lion to go hunting with him.
    “Hunting?”   Lion said.   They’d never done so before.   “What would we hunt?”
    “Muskrats,” George said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for two men who had never gone hunting before to suddenly go after creatures who did no one the least bit of harm and had no worth to anyone except each other.
    Lion thought it over.   He got his coat and put on his heaviest boots.   It would be muddy out by Halfway Pond, the best area for muskrats, if that was what a man was after.   They left early, while everyone else was asleep; they took the horses and rode down the King’s Highway then into the woods.   There was a fellow who lived out here,