Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter

sister. “Heavenly Father, if it is true that you give us sorrow and joy in equal measure according to the strength of our backs to bear the load, have mercy on your daughter Rebecca and give her now the joy in her new life that you withheld from her in this one.” Henry opened his eyes to peek at his mother, but he couldn’t see her face. “We pray that as she enters your kingdom …”
    Her voice left off suddenly and her body hunched with some strange effort, her head bowed from sight beneath the line of her shoulders. The rifle slung over his mother’s shoulder shifted this way and that as if it was aiming at some high-flying, far-off bird. Rebecca’s tiny boots kicked against the table three or four times, then lay still.
    In the silence that followed, Henry looked over at Rachel and her brothers. Corwin and Rachel’s heads were bowed, but Duncan’s eyes were wide open and he was watching Henry’s mother as well. After a long while a sigh escaped her lips andshe continued, “We pray, Heavenly Father, that as she enters your kingdom you will offer her some explanation for the sorrows that you, in your infinite wisdom, saw fit to visit upon her.” His mother’s hands dropped to her sides all at once. She turned, the rifle butt clanking hard against the parquet as she sank to the floor. She pulled the gun around and laid it across her lap, leaning back against one of the table legs for support. She closed her eyes. “Amen.”
    She opened them again. Her hair was mussed, her face as waxen as her dead sister’s. Corwin and Rachel still had their eyes closed and their heads bowed. She glanced at Henry and then at Duncan. The boy looked back at her steadily. She looked more exhausted than Henry had ever seen her. She reached behind with one hand and used the lip of the table to pull herself to standing. “Corwin, Rachel, you can open your eyes now. Henry,” she said, “come along with me.”
    She walked through the upper rooms, standing in doorways, trailing her hands absentmindedly behind her along the walls as if her fingertips were collecting old memories. Here and there a few strips of dirty wallpaper had once been printed with lilac bunches and roses. One room had been a nursery, and where there had been a water closet, part of the wall had fallen away, the room dropping off abruptly into open air and the dusty lawn below. The tub and washbasin were filled with old charcoal.
    There was a sharp, mildewed odor to the rooms. Plaster pieces lay fallen and cracked everywhere. One room was bare save for a pair of boots lined up against a wall, a broomstick planted stick-down in the hole of one as if awaiting the firing squad. “It didn’t used to look like this, Henry,” she blurted all at once, standing framed in the crumbling hallway. “It was a beautiful house once. Do you believe me?”
    He went to take her hand, but she brushed by him now and ran down the stairs. He went to a window and looked down to the yard where she had joined the Colonel. She was leaning forward and speaking to the man’s unmoving profile, strands of her hair escaping the knot she had tied it in and puffing into cirri around her face. Henry crept down the stairs to the porch and stood half hidden in the doorway, next to Rachel. The Colonel seemed oblivious to his mother’s ferocious presence. He stared off into nothing as she spat words so quietly at him that Henry couldn’t make them out.
    Just when it seemed he had turned into some Civil War statue the Colonel collapsed from his reverie and walked to the squash patch and pulled a rusty shovel from where it was stuck into the ground. “Boys!” he yelled toward the house, and looked off into the far distance as he waited for an answer. When none came, he did not call again, instead holding the shovel handle toward the open doorway where Henry was standing.
    Henry’s mother snatched it away from the Colonel and stepped back, the shovel in one tightly clenched hand, the rifle