The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford Page A

Baskervilles in my possession was, at first, an unsettling experience. It felt like I had taken some personal belonging of my mother’s, just as if I had stolen my father’s watch or Nan’s hairnet. The book itself had an aura of power that prevented me from simply opening the cover and beginning. I hid it in my room, between the mattress and box spring of thebed. For the next few days, I’d take it out every now and then and hold it, look at the cover, gingerly flip the pages. Although by this time my mother used the big red volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes only as an anvil in her sleep, there had been a time when she’d read it avidly over and over. She’d read a wide range of other books as well but always returned to detective stories. She loved them in every form and, before we went broke, spent Sunday mornings consuming five cups of coffee and a dozen cigarettes, solving the mystery of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
    Painting, playing the guitar, making bizarre collages—those were mere hobbies compared to my mother’s desire to be a mystery writer. Before work became a necessity for her, she’d sit at the dining-room table all afternoon, the old typewriter in front of her, composing her own mystery novel. I remembered her reading some of it to me. The title was Something by the Sea, and it involved her detective Milo, a farting dog, a blind heiress, and a stringed instrument to be played with different-colored glass tubes that fit over one’s fingers. Something by the Sea was the name of the resort where the story took place. All the while she wrote it, she kept Holmes by her side, opened to The Hound of the Baskervilles.
    Thinking about my mother one night, I wondered if maybe there was something in The Hound of the Baskervilles that could tell me something secret about her. I passed up Perno Shell and pulled the book out from under the mattress. That night I stayed up late and read the first few chapters. In them I met Holmes and Watson. The book wasn’t hard to read. I was interested in the story and liked the character of Watson very much, but Holmes was something else.
    The great detective came across to me like a snob, the type my father once described as “believing that the sun rose and set from his asshole.” I imagined him to be a cross between PernoShell and Phileas Fogg, but his personality was pure Krapp. When told about the demon hound, Holmes replied that it was an interesting story for those who believed in fairy tales. He was obviously “not standing for it.” Still, I was intrigued by his voluminous smoking and the fact that he played the violin.

Delicious
    The days sank deeper into autumn, rotten to their cores with twilight. The bright warmth of the sun only lasted about as long as we were in school, and then once we were home, an hour later, the world was briefly submerged in a rich honey glow, gilding everything from the barren branches of willows to the old wreck of a Pontiac parked alongside the Hortons’ garage. In minutes the tide turned, the sun suddenly a distant star, and in rolled a dim gray wave of neither here nor there that seemed to last a week each day.
    The wind of this in-between time always made me want to curl up inside a memory and sleep with eyes open. Dead leaves rolled across lawns, scraped along the street, quietly tapped the windows. Jack-o’-lanterns with luminous triangle eyes and jagged smiles turned up on front steps and in windows. Rattle-dry cornstalks bore half-eaten ears of brown and blue kernels like teeth gone bad, as if they had eaten themselves. Scarecrows hung from lawn lampposts or stoop railings, listing forward, disjointed and drunk, dressed in the rumpled plaid shirts of long-gone grandfathers and jeans belted with a length of rope. In the true dark, as I walked George after dinner, these shadow figures often startled me when their stitched and painted faces took on the features