The world holds whispers in it. I cannot but hear others’ voices underlying my daily sounds: women in the birdcalls, a child beneath the twitch of branches at my windowpane. I am their captive listener. In the market, I look into the faces of boys and see below the lineaments of their adult faces. I see also the twelve-year child in the cheeks of old men, and the prance and twinkle captive in the feet of the tired women who drag themselves in a weary line from home to the public well. I understand now what I had early learned: There resides a kind of sight in books; the men and women there are more real than the four walls in which a reader sits. I had long ago heard the words of those I read in the tones of my mind’s voice, but this new crossing over, this simultaneous life and underlife, is unlike all I have ever imagined.

September

I am strangely apprehensive and cannot concentrate on tasks. There is a wind in the trees, like to keening. I will walk out.

September

There was a breeze begun to whistle slightly, or it was my mother already reached the old blacksmith shop and singing to herself as she did. I turned in the direction of the music and fixed my attention on the way through the trees, picking over the thick roots and marking the bright tops of mushrooms looming above the moss. My skirts rustled in the needles behind me, almost, I felt, as if I walked over a wood floor strewn with the rushes cast off at threshing. I closed my eyes, instinctively yearning away from what now I see I must have known awaited me.

The closer I drew to where my mother tended, the higher pitched grew the wind, until, just before I turned the bend to step into the clearing where sat the blacksmith’s shop, the sound of the wind rose to a shriek, high and sharp as the cry of a gull, but with the undernote of a moan. I clutched at the mantle around my head, endeavoring to muffle my ears in wool. But I could not keep myself from walking farther toward the sound.

The shack sits against a giant granite boulder, like a jewel inset in a barbarous crown. In the summer, Spanish moss hangs down, winding its way through the gaps in the abandoned roof, affecting the appearance of hair brushed back on either side of the roofs pitch, falling lightly away. The moss now wore the aspect of torn veils around an elderly lady. I stepped past the well-known sight to glimpse where my mother had taken herself. My hand traced the corner of the shack, fingering its old boards and lightly holding on to it for balance, my eyes again cast down to concentrate on my footing.

So I was not prepared for what I saw there behind the shop, in the stone theater made by the bowl of quarried rock.