What does this have to do with anything?
Alan flipped through the pages.
“December 13th. It’s so warm out today—we played in the yard after dinner. Branny made a song about a field mouse. He asked me to write it down, but I forgot.”
Alan set the book up on its spine and let it open to where it would. The book opened to a spot about halfway through.
“October 25th. Mother said she’ll bring them to us tonight. She said I would do the same for my daughter, so I should write down the words. Mother’s writing is indecipherable. She said that Father would recite a verse, and then she would speak, and then it will be my turn.”
Under the Father heading, there was a short verse.
Alan read the verse twice. He searched his confused memory, trying to recall if he’d heard those words the night before.
“What are you doing?” Liz asked, her voice thick with sleep.
“Nothing, honey,” Alan said. “Just reading.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bob's
OCTOBER 26
WHEN ALAN pulled up, Bob was outside, working in the yard.
“Hey, how’s the cripple?” Bob asked as Alan got out of the car. “I thought you were supposed to be on crutches.”
“I ditched them,” Alan said. He leaned against the door of his Toyota.
“I see you’ve been back to the house?” Bob asked, gesturing at Alan’s car.
“Yeah, just for a couple of things.”
Bob nodded.
“We’re down at American Suites now,” Alan said. “We moved there today. The Inn was working our budget pretty hard.”
“How long are you staying there?”
“Until the end of the month at least. I don’t know. Joe goes back to school a week from Monday. So maybe we’ll move back next weekend. Still not sure.”
“You think something might happen?” Bob asked. “More trouble?”
Alan looked at the sky. It was a nice afternoon—blue skies with a few puffy white clouds for decoration. The day had warmed into the sixties even though they’d seen frost on the grass that morning.
“You want to take a walk?” Alan asked.
“I’d be happy to. Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“As long as we don’t get too crazy,” Alan said. He motioned towards the path that led to the snowmobile trail.
In a few months, Alan thought, this place might not seem so secluded.
The snowmobile trail looked like it was going to be a major thoroughfare once the snow hit. Another team of eager trail riders had been through with chainsaws and widened the trail even more. Alan and Bob walked down the hill, smelling the scent of freshly trimmed pines. Alan rolled his left foot around the edge with each step to minimize the pressure on his toe. Even with care, the stitches throbbed. He’d skipped his painkillers that morning—he didn’t like the idea of driving while doped up.
“I want to see how the beaver pond looks since the storm,” Alan said.
Bob nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets as they walked.
“So how much of that book did you read?” Alan asked.
“All of it,” Bob said. “I was waiting around in the hospital to find out how your surgery went, and then when I got home I couldn’t get to sleep. I read it twice, actually.”
“Did you make sense of it?”
“Sophia’s entries were tough to decipher. Marie made a little more sense. I didn’t have any problems at all reading Violet’s entries, except for those little hearts she put over each J.”
Alan laughed.
They reached the bottom of the hill. As they turned left, Alan saw the devastation from the flooding and destruction of the beaver dam. What used to be a pond was now a muddy mess. The water was only a thin stream between two wide banks of spongy dirt. The beaver lodge was in ruins as well. Alan wondered if the beavers had drowned in the rain.
“What did you think of it?” Bob asked.
“I’d rather hear your perspective first,” Alan said. “I think my judgement might be a little clouded.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “Want to sit?”
He motioned at a couple of big rocks that sat near what used to be the pond’s shoreline. Alan followed him over there.
“I think Sophia started the diary because her mother couldn’t write. I don’t know if the father could. Buster said his father used to read books all the time, so if he wasn’t lying about that, then I guess the father could. Anyway, it looked to me like Sophia was given the task of documenting the processes, so they could move them from an oral tradition to something a little more rigorous.”
“Rigorous,” Alan said with a smirk.
“But Sophia used the diary for more than just documentation. She wrote down quite a bit about her life—she talked about getting married so young, healing people, and then eventually about having a daughter and when her daughter was taken away from her,” Bob said.
“What else did you notice about Sophia?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mental illness?” Alan asked. “Her rants about suicide, and how she talked about amputating her own fingers?”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “But those things happened after they took Marie away from her. It was pretty clear that she was devastated by losing her daughter. I really wasn’t surprised by the change in her mental state. They never told her it was coming and then one day they just took her daughter away to be raised by someone else. I think that would unbalance most mothers.”
“What about her healing?”
“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what to think about the healing. It’s difficult—she didn’t really know what was wrong with the people they brought to her, except in the couple of cases she wrote about where they were physically deformed. I liked the description one of them had. Was it Marie or Violet who suggested that tumors have their own souls?”
“Marie,” Alan said, nodding.
“She said that one of her patients who had a brain tumor was having conversations with it.”
“Perkins,” Alan said. “Dudley Perkins.”
“Yes,” Bob said. “When Marie called the migrators to come take away Dudley’s brain tumor, he sang a song to bid farewell to his friend. That’s an interesting idea—the soul of a tumor. I wonder if anyone’s done a movie about something like that.”
“Cancer’s not a very sympathetic character,” Alan said.
“Despicable characters sometimes lead to good cinema,” Bob said.
“So do you believe any of that stuff from the book?” Alan asked.
“Well…” Bob said. He looked off across the ruins of the pond and thought for a minute before speaking again. “When I was reading it for the second time, I kept thinking how well it all fit. Buster described them as phantoms that fed on the remnants of human spirit. The book said that they would normally stay underground, but a woman with the right training could bring them to the surface to remove demons from human hosts. If you assume that by demons they mean cancer or illness, then it’s like using leeches to suck impurities from a person’s blood, right? One woman of each generation is trained to coax those creatures to the surface to cure people.”