When I came home at noon and later after school and then in the evening, I could hear her before I had left the road to turn into the lane:

Well they know without my telling

Where she lives, for whom I long.

Round their hoofs the snow is swirling.

Loud the coachman sings his song.

Round their flying hoofs the snow is swirling.

Loud the coachman sings his song.

Or, in the night, half asleep but alert to every noise, I could hear her sorrowing, for she had changed the gay tune into a dirge:

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!

Quick, my flying hawks, away!

Days and hours like these are golden—

We must seize them while we may.

Golden days are these and golden minutes—

We must seize them while we may.

She never spoke to me. She might look me full in the face as if she were about to say something. Then, if I spoke, she drowned out my words with another verse of her song or, instead, repeated one line again and again with a passionate monotony:

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!

Hurry, horses, faster, faster!

But my little brother heard nothing. His fever was coy; each time it went down, Mrs. Henderson and I were comforted, but only for an hour or so. On the fourth day, there was no diminishing of it at all. On the contrary, it went steadily higher until it had reached 106 degrees. Mrs. Henderson said he should be taken to the hospital at once and she called out the window to Sarah to run to the village and telephone the doctor. It was late in the afternoon and I had been home from school for an hour or so. Terrified as I was by the anxious tone of the woman’s voice, I was so weary that when she advised me to go into the kitchen to rest for a few minutes until the doctor came, I agreed.

My mother, her head bent over her work, was singing through smiling lips. The sun was going down. The red light glowed on her face and hair with a softness and subtlety that made it seem a property of her own being, an interior light which, passing through the many filters of her body, the tissues, bones, and muscles, was revealed, at its mellowest, upon her skin so that her face did not reflect the sunset but resembled it. Through the window I could see the sky, striped with stratus clouds of pink and deeper shades of pink, separating here and there to disclose a streak or patch of green like pale shoots and leaves amongst flowers.