Novelties & Souvenirs Read Online Free Page A

in a clear amber unclouded by grown-up perceptions of use, worth, price, burdensomeness. The farm had not altered for him, grown problematic, in the end insupportable. She felt, unwanted, a pang of loss; for herself more than for him. A few fat raindrops exploded against the windshield, then no more.
    Through Massachusetts the storm that they seemed to be driving fast toward, as toward a destination, had grown, changed shape continually; as though hung for a pageant, moving on wires, two and sometimes three ranks of clouds crossed the sky at different speeds, and spotlights of sun picked out now this, now another bit of golden hillside. When they crossed into Vermont, the wind began to press hard on the car, and great flights of leaves blew across the highway like the flights of starlings in the brown fields. Northwest the clouds were not distinct, they were a solid cloak of the deepest gray, fuzzy with unseen rain. “That’s where we go,” Phillippa said. “But at least here’s Vermont.” She knew it was foolish, but couldn’t help saying, “Whenever I cross the border, I always think of the lines about Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said…”
    “This is my own, my native land.” He said it without irony, as though just discovering it to be true. “The land of heart’s desire.”
    She remembered a photograph Amy had sent once. John, perhaps thirteen, stood before a shabby stand of alders and nameless undergrowth. Through the thin growth a midwestern landscape could be seen, featureless. Caught in the twiggy undergrowth were bits of paper, trash, human residue. Amy had written on the back “John’s ‘woods,’” as though that were what John called them. Exile. Maybe hell was where you had been most unhappy. No: no hell in his heresy. “We’ll see Ascutney soon,” she said. “Or maybe not, in this weather.”
    “Outside the kitchen door,” he said—and it took her a moment to realize he was still thinking of the farm—“there were raspberry bushes.”
    “Yes.”
    “Very thick; so thick it was hard to open the door. And a little stone porch.”
    “Just a flagstone step. It was large to you, maybe.”
    “Bees. And the smell of those bushes…”
    You can pick quarts of them in the summer, she said. The smell of them in the sun is terrific.
    Yes, he said, looking not at the brown November garden but at her. Inside, her mother and the movers walked back and forth, their footsteps hollow. I’m sorry, really, to be taking it all from you.
    Don’t be silly. His eyes, large, liquid, remote, were—were whatever is the opposite of silly. She felt no anger at him, and not envy; she did want him to have her house; only—for a wild moment—wanted desperately not to lose it either. She wanted to share it, share it all; she wanted…He went on looking at her, fixedly and unashamedly as a cat; and there came a flaw in time, a doubling of this moment, a shadow scene behind this scene, in which he asked her to come now, come to stay, stay now, stay always, yield it all to him and yet have it all…. As instantly as she perceived it, the flaw healed, and No, no, she said, blinking, turning back to the kitchen door, shaken, as though, unaware, she had found herself walking out on ice.
    She remembered that moment now, a cold wave rising beneath her heart. Mount Ascutney rose up very suddenly, blackish and with storm clouds disturbed by its head as though it wore wild hair. The pale gash of the road seemed to plunge into it.
    “You never went back,” John Knowe said.
    “No. Never. It would be very changed, I’m sure.”
    “Yes. No doubt.”
    Wind shoved them suddenly, violently. The road had become shiny as a ballroom floor, the day dark as night. No doubt, no doubt. John Knowe drew a long, straight pipe from his pocket and put it unlit in his mouth. “It looks like this is it,” he said.
    Rain coursed down the windshield as they rose up and shot down a rise with