Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai Read Free Book Online

piano that only I will know are for Astrid. And I’m certain I’ll be coming back here alone.
    Before the shoot starts, Ines and I and everyone lower on the totem pole will run around making the place look like November: desolate and cold and fading. We’ll stand on ladders to pull leaves off the trees. I’ve done it before. I’ve done stranger things, too. We’ll spray some of the remaining leaves yellow, some red. We’ll make everyone wear a coat. We’ll kill the grass with herbicide.
    It’s sick and it’s soulless, but it’s one of the addictive things about my job: Here, you can force the world to be something it’s not.
    We’ll take the four contestants one by one into the foyer and put them on that ridiculous chair, and ask them, Why do you deserve to win? How passionate do you feel? What do you love about your work? How much do you love your work? What
is
this sucker punch, love, that ruins us so completely?
    And can you say it in a full sentence?

THE MIRACLE YEARS OF LITTLE FORK
    I n the fourth week of drought, at the third and final performance of the Roundabout Traveling Circus, the elephant keeled over dead. Instead of stepping on the tasseled stool, she gave a thick, descending trumpet, lowered one knee, and fell sideways. The girl in the white spangled leotard screamed and backed away. The trainer dropped his stick and dashed forward with a sound to match the elephant’s. The show could not continue.
    The young Reverend Hewlett was the first to stand, the first to signal toward the exits. As if he’d just sung the benediction, parents ushered their children out into the park. The Reverend stayed behind, thinking he’d be more useful here, in the thick of the panic and despair, than out at the duck pond with the dispersing families.
    The trainer lifted his head from the elephant’s haunch to stare at the Reverend. He said, “Your town has no water. That’s why this happened.”
    The elephant was a small one, an Asiatic one, but still the largest animal the Reverend had ever seen this close. Her skin seemed to move, and her leg, but the Reverend had watched enough deaths to know these were the shudders of a soulless body. The clowns and acrobats and musicians had circled around, but only Reverend Hewlett and the trainer were near enough to touch the leathery epidermis, the short, sharp hairs—which the Reverend did now, steadying one thin hand long enough to run it down the knobs of the creature’s spine.
    The Reverend said, “There’s no water in the whole state.” He wondered at his own defensiveness, until he saw the trainer’s blue eyes, accusatory slits. He said, “I’m not in charge of the weather.”
    The trainer nodded and returned his cheek to the elephant’s deflated leg. “But aren’t you in charge of the praying?”

    At home in the small study, surrounded by the books the previous Reverend had left behind two years prior, Hewlett began writing out the sermon.
Here we
are
, he planned to say,
praying every week for the drought to end. And yet who among us brought an umbrella today?
He would let them absorb the silence. He’d say,
Who wore a raincoat?
    But no, that was too sharp, too much. He began again.

    The Roundabout was meant to move on to Shearerville, but now there was the matter of elephant disposal. The trainer refused to leave town till she’d been buried, which was immaterial since the rings and tent couldn’t be properly disassembled around the elephant—and even if they could, their removal would leave her exposed to the scorching sun, the birds, the coyotes and raccoons. The obvious solution was to dig a hole, a very large hole, quickly. A farmer offered his lettuce field, barren anyway. But the ground was baked hard by a month of ceaseless sun, horses couldn’t pull the diggers without water, and although the men made a start with pickaxes and shovels, they calculated that at the rate they were digging, it would take five full weeks to get an