She picked the box up, stuffed the doll under one arm, and went gingerly down the steep attic stairs, feeling as if she had escaped. Always when she came downstairs into the warm kitchen after a trip to the attic, she felt the same way—as if she had been through a kind of ordeal and escaped alive. Mostly we don’t want the past around, she thought. I wonder why, she asked herself as she got a clean rag out and wet it and carefully wiped the dust and grime off the lid of the box so her grandfather’s name, painted in dull gold, could be seen—SETH LOCKHART. He had taken the box to Dartmouth with him and brought it back filled with geological specimens. What is it, she wondered, standing there, her hands laid flat on the clean lid, not exactly afraid of opening it but loath to—what is it that makes our own history weigh on us? You have to be past fifty before you can stand to hear all those tales, and then, by the time you might want to know, those who wanted to tell and were not listened to are dead. We don’t want to face our own negligence and not-caring, I expect. Even a doll lying there with wide-open eyes accuses.

But before she opened the box, Ellen went to the window to see that Nick was all right. There he was, lying under the apple tree, his arms crossed under his head, looking up at the sky. What things go on in his head! she thought—things I’ll never know. He looked happy, Foxy lying there beside him, wagging his tail, and his pink tongue hanging out. There is nothing harder than to get started on a task you don’t want to do, she thought, finally lifting the box up and sitting down with it in her lap.

When she opened the lid, she smelled that slightly dank smell of old books and papers, and lifted out a bundle of School Committee Reports, 1855–65 (that would come in handy) and a very worn Elementary Speller that her grandfather must have inherited. “Ebony, editor, effigy, elegy, element, embassy, embryo, emerald …” she whispered aloud—and wondered whether the children who learned to spell all those words ever learned to use them. But everyone loved the spelling bees, the next best thing to hopscotch. She lifted out a set of notebooks she had made for herself, by sewing together ruled paper. “Ellen Lockhart, March 1909,” it read, in a slanting, careful hand, very unlike her casual way of writing now. It contained lessons in history and faded clippings from newspapers, poems she had copied out for the smaller children to learn by heart, and answers to the problems in an arithmetic book that she had worked out painfully, so as to be prepared.

“Dear me,” Ellen said, “I didn’t know enough to be a teacher, did I?”