STEPHEN O'CONNOR
433
muskrats standing in the shadows, and shivers run all through the
house. Even Ava cannot feel the warmth of memories and Tim can't see
the view of the lake, but she remembers where the kerosene lamps are
kept and quickly the auburn panels remember her. There is her sister at
the table! Her father comes in with an armload of woodl Ava wants to
make a fire, but Tim wants to go to bed. The man with the axe is
coming up from the lake.
"I forgot to tell you, this house is haunted," she says when they have
joined their sleeping bags and the light is out. "People from town
don 't ever come out here because a farmer who lived here murdered
fourteen people." "How?" "With an axe." So Tim hears corpses
tapping inside the walls and sees grinning axe blades when he closes
his eyes and dreams about fourteen people around a conference table
having a seminar on cannibalism.
But Ava lets her hands rest on her belly and listens to the footsteps of
her father who can't sleep, and shortly before dawn her mother opens
the door and blows her a kiss . "Where you are lying is where you were
conceived." The door closes and Ava comforts the child beneath her
fingers.
In
the morning Ava vomits and Tim asks, "Are you sick?" "I've got a
stomach virus." But when she sweeps the kitchen she thinks, 'Nesting
behavior. ' When she throws back the curtains and the sunlight bursts
on the floorboards she whispers, "I'll have a boy." When she cuts
onions for soup, "A gir
I. "
She wraps a black box in red vel vet and gives
it
to
her sister who carries it fourteen miles into town and gives it to me.
They cut wood together until their hair and clothes begin to smell like
smoke. The silver trunks of the blighted Dutch Elm watch them from
the fields . Yellow stalks of unharvested corn hiss on warm breezes and
solemn pines descend to the lake where Tim feels his hands become as
hard as leather . He astonishes Ava by skipping rocks out to the gray
lake middle where a hand reaches up and catches them.
Then they discover the geese, which Tim calls ducks, and chase them
down the shore, picking up stiff brown feathers as they fall. They tickle
each other while the redfaced farmers ride grunting machinery, bring–
ing produce out of the land, and a polar jetstream unhooks, causing
the frigid westerlies to drift southward.
In
a sudden celebration of
Indian Summer Ava throws off her clothes and runs out over the water
