The Eleventh Year Read Online Free Page A

mature than his years. He’d been that way as a young man too: twenty-three going on fifty!
    Margaret spoke to her neighbors and baked cakes and helped set up the Women’s Auxiliary at the church. She didn’t believe in this nonsense of the suffragettes. It was better to leave the thinking, the serious ponderings of state, to the menfolk. But it was lonely sometimes when John was in the study, writing his sermons, and she was the only one in the parlor, except for the girl, Emma, who came in two hours a day to help with the cleaning. John had found her: a German Catholic, if you please! But he’d given her the job in spite of this, because she’d needed it, he’d said. Needed it for that child of hers, the one who had no father who sometimes hung around the kitchen. Three years old and still a mess….
    It wasn’t that way with her own daughter, Jamie. Jamie Lynne, clean and well scrubbed, plump and rosy like her mother. Jamie Lynne, named for Margaret’s parents, the Jamisons. She was a joy, but too quiet, like her father. One could learn to overcome timidity, as she herself had; one could never overcome innate quietness. It was in the disposition.
    But Jamie befuddled her mother: She read. She found her father’s old, gilt-edged Bible in his study. She read of Isaac and Jacob, of Ruth and Esther. What marvelous stories! She didn’t like Sundays in the gloomy old church, musty and brown. She liked to walk in the park, or to climb in and out of ditches near the university. Some day, she thought, she would see what really went on in a university. She was so small and didn’t understand. But as she grew, the fascination remained. Sundays were like boiled cabbage: One had to swallow them. Papa behind the pulpit, describing things that only she, Jamie, could understand. For the farmers he was a saintly man, because he was good, in his reserved, unsmiling way, helping where he could. But they did not know, nor did they care, that he was also a poet. Jamie cared. She cared about the cadences of Papa’s phrases, about his choice of images. One day he told the people that they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and she thought that was wonderful. Later he showed her where it had been written in the Bible. The Bible was beautiful, as beautiful as the church itself, with its rancid smells, was an eyesore and a depressant. Why had Papa become a minister? He should have written poetry, like Wordsworth, about the scenery and feelings and ideas. In her own little room, before going to have her hair washed and braided, Jamie sometimes wrote lines of images that came to her in the afternoon: “golden mirror of the sun,” “small slender leaves of fall,” “red and green cabbage like the rose and its leaf.” Simple things. She was only ten or twelve then. Papa was over forty and should have done better. His farmers wouldn’t have missed him. Half of them didn’t even understand his accent!
    She was sent to public school, with Emma’s son, Willy. Willy was a year and a half older than Jamie and, really, a lot prettier. Nobody knew anything about Willy’s father; Emma had always pursed her lips proudly and refused to reveal a single thing. The church women wondered. He must have been part Irish, with his dark hair and blue eyes and his white skin. Not at all German, like Emma. Willy was skinny and she, Jamie, was always round. Her eyes were blue too, but of a different shade. His reminded her of the depths of the ocean and hers, of a spring sky. They went to school hand in hand, the quiet little girl with her neat brown braids and the tallish, skinny boy with his black curls. He spoke all the time, the words tumbling out rapidly. Maybe he spoke so much because in the house it was gloomy and his mother felt embarrassed; or maybe it was because her mother, Margaret, never paid him the slightest attention and treated him as if he’d