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Show 45 reminding him that he was alive and that the apples would be ripening soon, and that in a couple of months the sky would begin to fill with scaly clouds and a sharp wind would cut its way down from Canada, and that soon afterwards the woods on the neighboring farm would fill with snow, and the withered flowers on his grave would be buried and forgotten. He studied the compressed lips and the icy blue eyes of the angel and tried to guess how badly he was in for it, until a thread of drool dropped onto his clasped hands, startling him. He knew that some of the small levities he had been about to mention in his prayers were actually big ones, and he wondered if he could anticipate the worst by saying so now, or if it were already too late. He wiped his chin with a pajama sleeve and cleared his throat, but the angel had already begun talking. Lorin felt a measure of relief, because the voice was thin and faint, as though coming to him across a great distance, and he had been afraid his whole family was going to hear, if not the whole neighborhood. As it was, he knew that anybody seeing the house from the road would think there was a fire in his bedroom and raise the alarm. He had visions of unshaven farmers with gaiters pulled over their underclothes gathering at the kitchen door with buckets in their hands, wives and children running back and forth to the pump, finally bursting through the door and pounding up the stairs, arousing the whole family. He saw them flinging open his door and standing there staring like owls as the angel over his bed was beginning a new list of accusations in that distant, metallic voice, and he saw his mother burying her face in her apron in shame. He couldn't tell if the vaporous light had anything to do with it, but the air currents in his room were definitely disturbed. Dust rising from his quilt gathered in tiny streams just above eye level and floated there like pennants before drifting toward the white figure of the angel |
