Excerpt of Garner by Kirstin Allio
(Page 3 of 6)
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"Perhaps this is how Frances came to set down on a loose
sheet of letter paper, Lay me as if in some small animal's burrow, buried
in needles and duff, beneath the White Pine. For there is no one from whom I
take more comfort."
(Once Willard Heald said to his wife that he felt he must do
the best he could for Frances, that he was her guardian angel and when his wife
snapped, "I see no well-loomed wings, Willard," he nodded gravely and
offered,
("Humans may be angels where angels can't be
found."
(Frances was the first person he knew closely who was born in
the Twentieth Century.)
"How did you come to read her letters?" said Mrs.
Heald thinly.
"Almost every day she managed to detain me, Mrs. Heald,"
said the postman with a certain affect. "Of course she spilled the
contents.
"She sent inquiries to a nunnery, and she wrote to the
great American novelist Winston Churchill who himself has always fancied New
Hampshire."
Mrs. Heald kept her hands busy as her husband spoke as if to
deny the conversation.
"A wise and solitary heart," proclaimed the
postman.
"Solitary," echoed his wife, although it couldn't
be said she meant a challenge.
("Mr. Heald," called Frances. Her voice seemed to
him lush for a girl, sonorous and demanding, vibrato on the horizon like before
a thunder. But she had a girlish habit of making odd couplets of conversation.
("I've so few possessions. I could directly partake of
the nuns' lessons."
(The postman craned his neck to see from where between the
maple leaves she was speaking.
("Just this heart-shaped pendant"—Heald caught
sight of her hand darting birdlike as if to drink from the cup at the throat of
her throat—"and a Letter Writer's Kit from my cousin in
Manchester.")
(He thought it was ten years ago he had delivered a maple box
of writing paper. Folk were accustomed to retrieve their parcels at the post
office, which was no more than an alcove of Buck Herman's store Heald used to
quarter the town—roughly—and sort the letters. But he had taken it home with
him, the package, since they were neighbors. Her composure was a rare thing;
neither shy nor high-strung like a filly or a rabbit. Now here is a child who
will hold her own against the Century, had thought the postman.)
"Willard," his wife broke in. "You've
stopped reading.
* * *
Dear Mr. Churchill, wrote Frances. I am a woman of the
age to decide what pursuit I must take for life. Marriage is out of the question
as I have always been ill at ease with those of Adam's—and here she
stopped and sat a long time with a still pen at the desk she borrowed from her
father, cocking her head this way and that into the dark corners of the study.
How was it that she wanted perhaps to become a writer and yet she dared not use
the word sex, which, admittedly, had been the first word to come to her
mind, and the second word she thought of was race, but in truth they were not a
different race altogether—and so she began again.
Dear Mr. Churchill, I wish to become a writer. What advice
can you give to a fellow American, a woman approaching the age to choose but
born and bred in a town smaller than your thumbnail, tucked between merely
knuckle-sized hills?
Isabel was a school friend who had already secured a place in
a nunnery. She sat upon the wooden steps of the library (it had been a
schoolhouse in the postman's time) and read to Frances from Greek mythology.
The postman crossed and heard Frances cry, "Give us Persephone!"
From Garner by Kirstin Allio, pages 11-25. Copyright
Kirstin Allio 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the
permission of the publisher, Coffee House Press.
