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Show 119 room upstairs-about the visitation. He considered what he had just heard, and then marched outside where he examined the spongy ground on both sides of the boardwalk leading from the kitchen door to the coal house. There were, of course, footprints. There were always footprints. He had gotten twelve children on her body and was to get two more before dying of a pleurisy in 1910, and footprints were everywhere, crisscrossing each other like strings of ants from the kitchen door to the gate, from the pump to the coalhouse, crowding and mashing each other along the edge of the boardwalk, stamped into wet leafmold under the Cottonwood, even pressed against the whitewashed side of the house, though someone would suffer for that one. He peered into the lilacs, inspected the coalhouse and the privy, circled the house three times, the third time suddenly doubling back and racing across his own footprints, and finally returned to his wife, who was sponging up the last of her mop water. It was time, he said, to exercise his priesthood and call on the Lord for an explanation. They gathered the children, who had crowded at two windows to watch, and knelt in a wide circle in the front room (avoiding the damp part of the carpet) for family prayer, into which he worked ambiguous language that wouldn't scare the children, thanking the Lord for the many and diverse blessings they all enjoyed and asking that their spiritual eyes be opened to know the meaning of the blessed visit that had just been vouchsafed them. After a long silence he looked at his wife and children and said that the Lord chose to keep his own counsel and they would understand it all in the Lord's own good time. The children were disappointed. So was Lorin. The sad thing about it was that no words had passed between mother and wraith. The child-she had died at fourteen, of diphtheria-had merely stood there in the doorway, her thin little hands folded across the front |
