Lake People by Abi Maxwell Read Free Book Online

to say, and now she felt sure that it wasn’t what had been in her heart. But Signe had left straightaway, and when she called later that day it was only to say that she had given the deed and all the necessary paperwork to Clara Thorton, who had been instructed to see that it was passed on to the girl when she came of age. Now nearly a week had passed and Signe had not reappeared.
    But the hymns, these would keep Sophie going. She thought she knew at least two hundred of them. Hear a song one time, and she could play it straight through. It was a gift and in the days after the baby Sophie sat at her piano and wondered what it might mean to leave this life for another. A musician in the city, a real, independent woman—she could become that; she believed she could. But instead she stayed at home and felt like the most horrible mother ever to be put upon this earth and she kept her suffering to herself, for that is the way it was done. Each time the mailman came to the front step and dropped a letter addressed to Malcolm from Jennifer in Oregon through the slot, Sophie would watch it as though it could at any moment move of its own volition. She would watch the dust in the air gleam in the sunlight and she would lift one of her aunt Signe’s glass paperweights from the mantel and hold it to the sun, trying, with no success, to make the beams of light refract, and she would know that her son was down the hill visiting the baby at Clara and Paul’s, and she would finally, when the letter did not move, stand up and say, “Make something of this blessed life,” and she would take that letter and hide it in the pile at the back of her top dresser drawer, where those pictures were, too, and she would return to the piano.
    Because what was her son to do with the words from Jennifer? What weight might those words pass on to him? There were two letters now and Sophie had not opened either of them, but she had held them to the light in the window, to no avail.
    But thank goodness for the turkeys. First that small family and now they had joined forces. Seven adults and twenty-three children, thirty turkeys in all! Daily they came into the field to sun themselves. “I could not go to the store,” Sophie had heard herself tell Otto one day. It was the first sentence she had spoken to him since they had handed the baby over. “I could not go out,it would disturb the turkeys.” The moment she said it she wished she had kept it to herself. Not to punish Otto; Sophie wasn’t the sort for that. This silence she now existed in had just washed over her. Maybe, she thought now, it was to punish herself. She had done wrong and so she would be silent. She would just go along, care for the turkeys. Do turkeys eat apples? There were four apple trees out there in the field and each year since her marriage Sophie had made enough applesauce to last through winter, but this year look at all those fallen apples. They were rotting out there among the leaves, which Malcolm had not raked because he had decided that he liked the look of it as it was, and Sophie had known just what he meant.
    Stand up. Do something with yourself. Sophie went out and placed apple after fallen apple into the wheelbarrow. She dumped them all near the stone wall, at the edge of the trees, an offering for the turkeys. When that was done morning had passed, and she reached up to pick her first apple. She bit in and that was joy, simple and quick. Sophie picked all the apples off the trees that day, and when she brought them inside she smothered the couch with them. Now she would make her applesauce; she would fill the house with that smell that told her sons that this was a place to come in and sit down and be home. Her son, she meant. Just the one.
    By the time Sophie had boiled down a batch of apples and cranked it through the food mill, there were footsteps outside and then the clank of the mail slot. Oh heavens, not another. Sophie lifted the pot and walked from the