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By Root 306 0

table in the corner of my bedroom and then I bring the drum inside and balance it carefully on the table. I shove two chairs up against each side. Whenever I touch the drum, even to set it down, it makes a sound. A high, hollow note. An uncertain creak, like a question. A slight tap on its edge sets up reverberations. It is exquisitely sensitive for so powerful an instrument, and I wonder what it sounds like when struck with force, by many and in unison. I turn off the light, get into bed, and lie there in my room with the drum. I leave my windows open just a crack at night, even in the winter. I like my room chilly. The darkness crackles with March cold and from time to time, deep in the woods, a barred owl screams like a woman in pain. I imagine that I might have dreams—pragmatic as I consider myself, it has been a long, strange day. The realization that I’ve stolen the drum outright surfaces and sinks. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I’m glad that I have got the weekend to decide how to proceed with the estate—I’m not sure I trust myself to catalogue another thing. No matter how justified by history I feel, I tell myself that I will not evade my guilt or rationalize away my conduct.

Which is not the same as even considering that I might do the right thing and return the drum to Sarah Tatro.

All I have is other people’s lives. What I do belongs to them and to my mother—her business, her legacy, her blood. Even the box of tears in my closet belongs to another woman, L.M.B. But now I’ve stolen the drum. And it seems to me, as I am lying in the dark of my room, that my instinctive theft signifies a matter so essential that it might be called survival. I have stepped out of rules and laws and am breathing thin, new air. My theft is but the first of many I’ll accomplish—though not of objects. There are other things I need and will have to have, things I’ll take. Thoughts, plans, private rages, and even joys now secret to myself.

I am usually a devoted sleeper, but tonight I’m wakeful. All night, it seems, I am listening. Thinking. So many ideas float in half-formed and then veer off.

When things are very quiet, the old house ticks. Not regularly, like a clock, but softly all through itself as the slats in the walls change temperature or the plaster tightens or the earth shifts underneath the granite slab foundation. From time to time, the little sounds that the house makes reverberate inside of the drum. My breath does, too. I hear a rising, then a falling. In and out. A greatness, a lightness. I grow heavier, then so inert my body seems without life. Between breaths, I lose feeling. And then my chest fills, a resurrection.

There is another thing that our old house does in the deep of night. I have heard it before and now I wait for it to happen. The house releases the whole day’s footsteps. All day we press down minutely on the wide old floorboards, moving about on small, regular errands, from room to room. It takes hours for the boards to readjust, to squeak back up the nails, for the old fibers of the pinewood to recover their give. As they do so, they reproduce the sounds of footsteps. In the night our maze of pathways is audibly retraced. I am used to it, as is mother, but sometimes a wakeful guest is frightened. I can understand this. For now, as I rise and I stand in half-darkness in the doorway of my bedroom, I hear the distinct creak of footsteps proceeding toward me, then past me, over to my bed. It’s very cold. My skin prickles. I feel the breath of my own passage, as though my dead self and living self briefly met in that doorway to sleep.

3

The Orchard

A disturbed hush has fallen upon our road. The two young people haunt it more than one would think. It is impossible to pull out onto the gravel without thinking of Davan’s rattling, red car or without imagining the long, slight form of Kendra trailing black scarves as she took her moody ambles, ears plugged with music. After the Assembly of God outpouring for Davan, which left Elsie and me in a daze, we attended the strangely shuttered memorial service