I remember watching as my mother picked up the mandolin my father had bought for her as a wedding gift. I remember how she cradled it in her arms as if it were a fourth child. And then she put it aside, took her mother’s silver locket from around her neck, and handed it to the doctor as payment for what he had not done.

After he went away, I remember trying to find a way to explain what it had been like when that tree fell, what my father and I had tried to do.

I remember failing.

And so I had held my tongue.

—

We had learned, since then, how to care for my father. How to prop him up and pour soup slowly, carefully, into his mouth, just drops at a time so he wouldn’t choke. How to tuck his chin down close to his chest and stroke his cheek and massage his throat to help him swallow.

How to turn him, again and again, in an endless battle with the horrible, leaking bedsores that came from lying still for so long. Esther always took Samuel outside to play when I helped my mother clean those sores with vinegar. We couldn’t know if my father felt the terrible pain of that acid on his raw flesh, but I worried that he did, though he was not the one who cried.

Most of all, we learned how to make his little room into a world apart.

As soon as there were spring flowers in the world beyond the cabin, there were flowers in my father’s room, too. Jonquils and crocuses and snowdrops in little vases everywhere.

My mother had dragged in the gramophone, the one impossible thing she had insisted on keeping from our town house, the horse struggling to haul it up the mountain on a sled, and she played it for my sleeping father as she once had, though there’d been no dancing since we’d come to the woods to live.

When I asked why she no longer played her mandolin, not once since nearly giving it to the doctor in trade, she answered by sighing and shaking her head. Laying her hand flat on her chest. And I didn’t ask again.

Before the accident, Esther had read to me and Samuel at bedtime each night. Now, she read to our father instead, though Samuel and I lay at the foot of the bed and listened. She read nothing sad. Only happy stories.

Samuel’s part was to lie next to our father and tell him about the day. Funny episodes filled with dog-play and mountain business: a moose stranding Mrs. Anderson in the privy; Mr. Peterson, with only a weak lantern for light, mistaking a skunk for Dinky, his mouser. Things like that. Harmless. Gentle.