The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma Page A

the boy’s face then trailing to an absent stare. It was as though he did not recognize his only son. At last he drew Elisha into a loose embrace. The man smelled of old, rank sweat. He kissed the crown of his son’s head, then without a word stepped into the sickroom and gently closed the door. Elisha heard his voice resume its murmured narrative.
    That night the boy gathered a spare shirt and comb and tin mug into a bundle, took a loaf of bread and chunk of salt pork and some cheese from the pantry. The house was quiet. He stood at his bedroom window, staring at the meetinghouse glowing white in the moonlight, the privy’s shadowy form, the pear trees gesturing toward the chicken house. In the next room his father lay asleep, and Elisha wondered if the man would even notice his own son’s absence. He smothered a bitter sob. He wanted to kick down the bedroom door, burst in on his father and shake the man awake. Instead Elisha opened the window, then stepped through it and started down the Springfield road.
    Where had she been? Elisha wondered now. It was as though his mother was being hidden away, as punishment for some unknown sin. He could not understand it. She must rest, his father had told him countless times, turning Elisha away from the closed bedroom door. Your mother is exhausted. Go now. She mustn’t be disturbed. She mustn’t ever be disturbed.
    When his father left the parsonage, Elisha would pad to the bedroom and press his ear against the closed door, try the doorknob. Locked. He would hurry to Corletta’s room, then follow the woman down the hallway, watch silently as she unlocked the door. His mother lay beneath a thick quilt, her skin clammy and pale. She smiled weakly. Elisha would pull a chair beside the bed and present his most recent sketches; she would take up a pencil and show him how to use shading to create depth, how to draw a viewer’s eye to the finest detail. Finally she would hold the drawings close, point out Newell’s citizens in the thrushes and toads and bumblebees. There was Aeneas Weatherspoon in a mantis’s bony elbows, Edson in a dung beetle’s blunt brow. Elisha himself in a wiry red squirrel. She laid a hand on the boy’s knee and closed her eyes. Her breath smelled of sour milk. Stiff, bloody handkerchiefs lay wadded on the side table. At last Elisha kissed his mother’s cheek and slipped from the room, fetched Corletta to lock the door. In his own room he curled on the bed and stared at the empty ceiling. He lay there for hours, until at last he fell asleep.
    A punishment, then. Elisha knew his father was disappointed in his weak faith: Reverend Stone had compared him endlessly to Newell boys who had heard the call. One boy in particular, James Davidson, had shocked the congregation by walking stiffly down the meetinghouse aisle during a sermon, then dropping to his knees with a fevered cry. For weeks there’d been talk of sending him to seminary in Cambridge. Reverend Stone had gone three days without speaking to his son; finally he told Elisha that he should be mortified. The son of a minister, yet lacking any trace of God’s will.
    Elisha had confronted Davidson that afternoon in the town green. The boy was sitting against an oak tree eating a pear. Elisha asked, “How did it feel?”
    “Did what feel?”
    “The vision. Or whatever it was. Your fuss during the sermon.”
    Davidson giggled, pear juice running down his chin. He said, “Like this.”
    He rolled to his knees and cried out, with precisely the same pitch and quaver as in the meetinghouse. Elisha stared, aghast. James Davidson rose and placed the wet pear in Elisha’s palm, then ran across the green.
    Now the boy started at a nearby rustle from the forest. He waited, motionless, but the sound did not repeat itself. Perhaps, he thought, I’m not homesick at all—perhaps this gloom is simply a product of the weather. Immediately he understood the thought to be false. He crouched deeper into his