She tried to calm down, staring back into the green bubbling liquid, but couldn’t stop herself. Turning to him again, she shouted, “What in God’s name do you ever do? I bought this place. I run this place. I do the books. I clean the rooms. I fix the cabins. I buy the groceries. I do the cooking. Jesus, what do you do?”

“My dear, I do wish you wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

He ducked quickly as the wooden spoon with which she had been stirring the soup ricocheted off the wall beside him.

“God damn you!” she screamed.

He quickly escaped the house. Outside, he took a deep breath and a moment later his face looked as serene as ever, as if what had just happened were no more than a sharp smell on a passing breeze. He had a leisurely smoke of his pipe and then went to cabin seven, which he had commandeered as his own, since The Lodge was never full. It contained everything he owned. A large picture of the Holy Virgin hung on one wall. On a shelf beside the bed, on which he now laid himself, stood five books: The Complete Works of Longfellow, The Poems of John Donne, The Birth of Tragedy, L’Immoraliste, and The Decline of the West, Volume 2. On an old wood and iron traveling trunk beside the bed, two frames each held a yellowing picture: one of a woman in a fur coat and flapper hat, standing in front of a fountain; the other of a British officer smoking a pipe, his arm curled affectionately around the barrel of a cannon.

Reaching up, Magnus pulled the hefty Spengler off the shelf. Propping himself against the headboard, he slotted on a pair of reading glasses and opened it at a place where a playing card had been inserted. Now he licked a finger and turned an onionskin page, letting his eyes play over the text, a canny smile surfacing periodically, as if he were thinking, Oh, Spengler, you old dog. Or he would look briefly dubious and then indulgent, as if he had spotted some specious reasoning but had decided to let his old friend get away with it—this time. Finally, after no more than five minutes, with a sigh of pleasure, he replaced the playing card and closed the book, leaving it on his chest. For the next two hours, he lay as still as a medieval effigy, staring out the small window at the trees until the room grew dark. After lighting a coal-oil lamp, he ate a few crackers with cheese and took a moment to decide between his three records: “Muskrat Ramble,” “Chinatown,” or “Fidgety Feet.” Deciding on the last, he put the player on repeat and returned to his bed. On it, as the same song played over and over and over again, he writhed like a man being electrocuted.

PISGAH
1954

ANNIE WAS SITTING HIGH UP ON THE STEEP ROCKY bank of the branch, looking down on Raj, Nora, and Lew, who were paddling in the water, turning over stones and looking for fossils. Alvin hung upside down, slothlike, from an oak limb above them. Cicadas churned out the August heat.