EXCERPT CONT. The Illness Lessonlouder than the rest of the words. “And
I must tell Hawkins. I’ll write him
today. Hawkins will know if there’ve
been others spotted. He’s told me
nothing grows or flies or runs in Mas-
sachusetts without his permission.”
Caroline hadn’t seen George Hawkins,
or any of the Birch Hill men, in years,
but she could picture the set of his
mouth in delivering this not quite jest.
He was a physician, only an amateur
naturalist, but the sort of man who
never considered himself an amateur
at anything. They all were.
The bird raised its head again. Its
black eye had the sightless sheen of a
drop of oil. It tossed some bit of bark
or insect back and swallowed it down,
muscular throat squeezing.
“I ought to send a drawing with the
letter. Caroline, would you? You have
a fine hand.”
She breathed in on the swell of pride
that came when her father praised her
and stared at the bird, to memorize it,
so that in the drawing itself she might
earn that praise again. She noted the
shape of the head; the shining, sharp-
looking lines of the wings; the beak like
a long, cruel tooth; the sweep of the tail
feathers; that red, improbable shade.
***The bird flew away before David
arrived, so they went back inside to
wait. Samuel wrote, and Caroline
drew. “I wonder what’s keeping him,”
Samuel said, but this was David he
was talking about, his last disciple and
unexpected hope; he didn’t say more.
In the confluence of Caroline’s two
projects, the drawing and the waiting, a
strange suggestion was taking hold.
Only one bird, she reminded herself.
Still, she tried to capture the line of the
bird’s beak and thought, Perhaps; she
shaded its eye and thought, Perhaps.
Considering slowed her hand. Her
trilling heart had only the basic out-
line of a back and head by the time
her father hurried to meet David at
the front door. From two rooms away,
Caroline heard them clearly—the
founders of the Birch Hill Consocia-
tion had tried to plug the drafts of this
hundred-year-old farmhouse when
they’d bought it, but they were men
with a greater affinity for ideas than
for planks. “Astonishing,” her father
was saying. “I never thought I’d see
them again, not on this earth. I’d for-
gotten their look. Such a red.”
“I wish I’d seen,” David said, and
Caroline wished for a basketful of
trilling hearts that she might carry to
him, pinned against the shelf of her
hip bone.
“Caroline must have nearly fin-
ished sketching by now.”
Before the door opened and theywere upon her, she just had time to
cover the page.
“Caroline—” her father said,
flushed and smiling. “Not yet.”
David inclined his head, but her
father went on. “Surely you’ve caught
at least some part of the essence.
Enough to give David an idea.”
No two men in all the world to
whom she would have been less will-
ing to show a half-formed thing. “Just
another half hour. I’ll bring it to you
in the study.”
Her father darted with a boy’s nim-
bleness and caught the drawing out
from where she’d hidden it. He held it
in the air and squinted. “Ah, well, not
done. This is the basic shape, though,
David. Nearly.”
Caroline’s father had written a
great and famous essay against cruelty,
which scores of New England school-
children could quote from memory.
She had seen him stop a man in the
street who was striking his horse.
“Oh yes,” David said.
Samuel set the sketch gently back
down on the tabletop. He led David to
the study and closed the door.
Caroline left the house. She strode
off across the grass. She drove her legs
forward as punishment—her own
fault, always mostly her own fault—
and sweat prickled the back of her
neck, beneath her heavy hair. A deep,