Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman Page B

old Sorrel McCluskey in a cabin he’d built on town land, who’d pretty much hunted the place clean and wore a coat made out of the pelts of the muskrats he’d caught.
    “Bad weather for hunting,” Sorrel said when they stopped by his cabin to pay their respects.   “Muskrats like fog.   Foxes like rain.   But a clear day’s good for nothing.”
    Well, they would see about that.   They were fishermen, after all.   They had patience and plenty of time.   There probably weren’t more than two muskrats left in the area, but that was fine.
    “Your mother wants you to apply for that fellowship,” George West said after they had both gotten comfortable.
    They had a nice view of Halfway Pond, but it wasn’t any prettier than the pond on their own property.   “The thing is, if I apply for it, I’ll get it.”
    “I think your mother knows that.”
    “She doesn’t know me the way you do, Dad,” Lion said to his father.
    “The way we feel about this place.”
    George had brought along a breakfast of two ham sandwiches wrapped in kitchen cloths, and the men set to eating.   It was so odd that George felt closer to Lion than he did to any of his natural children.   Was it because Lion had been the first, or because Violet had needed him so at that time?   Or was it simply because of who Lion was and always would be: George West’s favorite son.   While they had potato salad, George thought about telling him the truth that George wasn’t his father, that his real father had been a better man, a smarter man, a professor, as a matter of fact but if George West was anything, he was honest, honest to a fault.   To say Lion wasn’t his son felt like a lie, so instead he said, “Well, she’d like for you to apply.”
    They didn’t catch anything that day, but Lion brought his application back to Town Hall later in the week, and the entire family was proud of him when Jack Crosby came to town to present him with his fellowship.   The whole town planned to gather down at the green on that glorious day more to see Jack Crosby’s automobile than anything else, but there all the same.   Lion was to leave with Crosby that was part of the hoopla a ride all the way to Cambridge in this gleaming carriage, rather than the dusty old steamer that left out of Provincetown.   All of Lion’s sisters dressed up for the occasion, and George West put on his suit, the one he wore to funerals; Lion’s brothers made a plaque, which they hung on Lion’s bedroom door: Here slept the first man in town to go to Harvard College.
    After George had sent the children on to the celebration, he got the horses harnessed to the cart and went to look for Violet.   She was in the field of sweet peas that were all abloom, at their glorious peak.   The goldfinch came here at this time of year, for the thistle.   The crickets’ call was even and slow.
    George West leaned one foot up on the stump of an old oak tree.   Something white moved across the sky, a cloud, a puff of milkweed, the snow-colored blackbird that lived up by the pond.
    “Do you think I made a mistake?”   Violet said.
    She was not yet forty, but she was tired.   She realized that this one August day divided the before from the after.   All at once she knew that Lion wouldn’t be coming back.   She was right about that, as she had been about everything else.   Oh, he’d visit now and then during his four years in Cambridge, but then he’d go on to Oxford, and he’d be given a position in London, teaching higher mathematics at the university.   He’d be so concentrated on his work, so very busy, that he wouldn’t even fall in love until he was forty-two, older than Violet was right now.
    One day he’d be walking through Hyde Park and he’d see a young woman, an American girl, Helen, visiting an aunt and uncle, and he’d feel as though he was pierced through the heart.   Nothing in the world of mathematics had prepared Lion for love.   Nothing about it