Solace

Начало книги

It had been years since Tom’s son had spent so long at home. He stayed almost the whole summer, working the farm every day and sleeping in his old room, with the child’s crib at the foot of the bed. The child, Tom thought, seemed content in her new surroundings. He saw in her no signs of lonesomeness, no signs that she was pining for what she could no longer have. That she could not yet speak, that she could not name names and call for them, that she could not tell them what she had seen; for all of this, Tom was grateful, and he carried the child about with him often, her wordlessness resting between them like a veil.

In August the weather turned. The mornings came blue and sun-dazed, a haze wrinkling the sky over the fields. When the forecast promised it would stay that way for days to come, red bands of high pressure stoking the country from the south, Tom and Mark readied to save the hay. Mark knocked three meadows the first warm evening, and Tom followed after him with the turner, whipping up the long blades of grass, setting them down neat as potato drills. As Mark began to bale two mornings later, Tom took the child to the edge of the meadow and showed to her the way it was done: the lines of grass, the huge yellow bales lurching out of the red machine, and the shape of her father in the tractor cab, a hand on the steering-wheel, his head turned to watch the progress of the baler hitched behind.

Читать дальше →