EXCERPT CONT. The Illness Lessondark forest of hair, her father used to
say, when she was a child, and kiss the
top of her head. She’d thought he
meant she had magic, or magic would
happen to her. As she passed the line
of trees that obscured the house from
view, she didn’t slow, not until she had
climbed to the top of the main hill.
Below, their fields were spread, rich
enough for eating, as if someone had
taken up a heaping knifeful of sweet-
ness and stroked it across the ground
to tempt the appetite. The whole of the
Birch Hill experiment needed no more
explanation than that the weather
must have been fine on the day they
first saw the land. The sloping green of
the fields in the sun, stands of trees
clustered here and there, each casting
its shade like the dark wet spill of an
overturned bowl; the hills that grew
greener and larger, greener and larger,
in the distance, until at last they
became mountains, and blue; the air
thick with its grass-and-heather,
baked-dirt smell; the chorus of hum-
ming, chirping, buzzing things in the
grass, a small riot like the voice of the
soil itself. The land had the same over-
abundant beauty as Samuel Hood’s
essays, and so those men had all come
here to found a bright-colored world
on both. And when the trilling hearts
had arrived, a month into their proj-
ect, it had felt like God Himself was
telling them, Oh yes, just what I envi-
sioned, here, my final touch, by all
means proceed.
Important, Caroline thought, to
remember this time how that time
had turned out.
She let herself run down the far
side of the hill. The ground gave a lit-
tle beneath her feet. The neighbor boy
had come a few days earlier to help
them with the July haying, and there
was nowhere Caroline could go, not
even her bedroom, without tasting cut
grass.
Caroline crossed the little valley,
climbed the farther hill. And there, in
the apple orchard at the crest, she
found two trilling hearts twitching
amongst the leaves of the largest tree.
The first the brilliant color of the bird
from this morning, the other—it must
have been a female—a tamer red
brown. Not just one bird anymore,
then. Whatever was happening here, it
was doubling, doubling. The tree they
occupied, at the orchard’s center, was
the only one the Birch Hill founders
hadn’t planted—the farmer who’d sold
them the land had done that—and the
only one that had ever thrived, bear-
ing full ripe fruit in the fall. The birds
knew better than to trust their weight
to the others’ spindly branches. Caro-
line watched them move, in lines
instead of curves, start-stop, peckingat the surface of the world. Those
beaks she could almost feel, some-
where along her spine. She saw that
she’d gotten the angle of their backs
slightly wrong in her sketch.
David wanted to see them. He
could see them now, if she brought
him.
But back at the house, she found
David and her father on the front
lawn, watching more birds. Five trill-
ing hearts hopped from branch to
branch in the oak by the front door.
All on their own, without her help,
David’s eyes followed, and childish
disappointment made her throat ache.
“Look, Caroline!” her father
shouted, though she’d stopped right
beside him.
“More in the orchard too,” she said.
Samuel turned to David. “Now, I
think. What better time? They’ve
almost made our announcement for
us.”
David nodded.
The certainty settled heavy in Car-
oline’s chest: My father has hatched
some scheme, and David is leaving.
Samuel whistled into the sky. The
birds flapped a little at the sound, as if
it were a greeting. “I feel twenty years
younger.” Crisply, Caroline said,
“What are you talking about, please?”
“We have news, Caroline. We’ve been
making plans, David and I—to open a