Every day when the children gather for school, I feel Isaac’s absence. This grief was inevitable; he was too fey, too frail to survive many more years. But the manner of his death has given a trenchant edge to the inevitable.
I lean forward, stroke Shadow’s head. She still limps a little, but I think I notice it more than she does. And I’m grateful I still have her.
I’m grateful for many things today. Grateful for the sun, grateful for my life, grateful for Jeremiah and the accepting silence between us. He sits cross-legged, looking down the long slope toward the barn and house. He has a book in his lap. It isn’t a Bible. It is the collected poems of Emily Dickinson.
And all of us are especially grateful today. I attended the sabbath service this morning. I haven’t altered my habits and convictions when it comes to the religious life of the family, and in the past four months I had set foot in the church only once. That was for Isaac’s funeral. I made another exception today because on this sabbath Jeremiah baptized Esther’s baby. Daniel. Healthy and strong, and that’s the miracle I celebrated. I’m not concerned with his soul. Only his body now. Later I’ll be concerned with his mind. No. Stephen will probably be the one concerned with Daniel’s mind.
And so will Jeremiah, who is beginning to understand the value of the human mind, who has become in a way another student. Rather, he has become a son. He has let me be the mother he wanted me to be.
I hear distant voices. Esther and Miriam are coming out of the henhouse, Esther with Daniel in a sling on her back, Miriam carrying a basket filled with eggs in her right hand. She has no left hand.
Our Astarte’s perfect beauty is blemished. Like old Nehemiah, her arm has been amputated a few inches above the elbow.
I hear Jeremiah’s hissing intake of breath. He’s looking at Miriam, bewilderment and grief resurrected in his eyes. Part of the grief is for the sister he has, in a sense, lost. I wonder if he’ll ever resolve that loss in his mind. He asked who would forgive her and forgive him. He’s the only one who can.
And I wonder if I will ever look on this young woman laughing in the sun, her hair gilded with its light, without fear. Not for what she is now: for what she was, for what she could be again.
We thought she was dead.
For three days after she killed her son, Jeremiah and the others searched for her, and finally decided she had in her despair leapt off the Knob into the rock-strewn sea below. But I didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe Miriam would, however compelling her despair, defy the essential taboo against suicide encoded in her religion.
Yet in one sense I was wrong.
On the sixth day after that confrontation on the Knob, I had recovered enough for a walk to the tree, and Shadow had recovered enough to go with me. I wanted no human company; I was feeling smothered by solicitude. But I didn’t get to the tree. Just past the east gate, Shadow stopped me with her barking. She stood sniffing the air, then limped off south down the road toward Shiloh, and all my calling and whistling wouldn’t deter her. I followed her around the curve and saw something lying at the side of the road, tattered white and brown cloth nested in green fronds of bracken. Shadow’s barking turned vicious, and I knew then what she had found.
Miriam. She hadn’t fled her despair over the cliff at the Knob, but into the forest. She lay with her hair dull and tangled, her moonlight white gown stained with her son’s blood, torn by branches and thorns. On her monstrously swollen left arm, I saw the gashes from Shadow’s teeth. I remembered that purplish bronze color, that sweetly foul odor.
She was alive and conscious, terrified by Shadow’s barking and perhaps by me. I quieted Shadow, then leaned over Miriam, and she looked back at me with fevered, fearful eyes. I knew she didn’t recognize me even before she spoke, the words forced as if she weren’t sure how to form them. “Who are you?”
I said, “I’m Mary Hope.”
That meant nothing to her. She only stared at me until I asked, “Do you know who you are?”
She shook her head, grimacing. “No. I… don’t know.”
That was the way she committed suicide.
She couldn’t kill her body, but she killed the self within her whose memories she couldn’t tolerate.
But the self-death of amnesia might be transitory. To me, she was still Miriam, the priestess of the irrational, maniacally bent on murder—on my murder, on the murder of the past, on the murder of the future.
No one else at Amarna knew she was still alive. And she wouldn’t be alive much longer if I left her here. Her eyes closed, and I couldn’t see any sign of breath. I pressed my fingers under the curve of her jaw and finally found a faint pulse.
“Come on, Shadow.” And I turned away, walked back to Amarna.
Jeremiah was in the barn. I told him where to find Miriam.
Bernadette performed the surgery on the dining-room table with opium for an anesthetic, and if I had been seeking revenge, I’d have had it in the next few weeks. But I took no pleasure in Miriam’s pain, not the pain of recovery, nor the agonies she must have endured during those six days she was lost in the wilderness of forest and despair.
We told her only that her name was Miriam. No more. The family agreed with me on that, although it’s hard for the younger children to accept. But it has been impressed on them that they are not to say anything to remind Miriam of the past. She has been born again, and like a child she is being taught to be a human being.
Jeremiah watches Miriam and Esther as they walk toward the house. He turns away, stares at Isaac’s grave, and the twin griefs haunt his eyes.
“I wonder if she’ll ever remember, Mary.”
“She might. I hope not.”
“For her sake, yes.”
I don’t add, for our sakes, for the sake of the children. I look down at the book in his hand. “Read to me, Jeremiah. Your eyes are better than mine.”
He smiles. “But I can’t read as well.”
“Yes, you can. Please.”
He opens the book, turns a few pages, then, pronouncing every word carefully, reads:
Vital light. Ancient light. I think of Miriam and the well of darkness hidden in the depths of her memory. I think of the survivalists Luke found in the Siskyou Mountains, and they are a tide of darkness. And if their children survive, their darkness will flow deeper, generation unto generation, and ultimately it could quench our light. And other survivors may one day discover Amarna, unknown factors of light or darkness.
I look toward the Knob, and I can only see a corner of the vault through the fruit trees. I can do no more to keep our light burning. All that’s left me is hope, and that’s all Rachel and I had to begin with.
Jeremiah is still poring over the book, frowning with concentration as he reads to himself. I don’t disturb him. I think of the reclusive Emily reaching across an ivy-covered stone wall more than a century and a half thick to cast wildflowers in his path.
Then I raise one hand to shade my eyes. Stephen is coming up from the house. He walks with long strides, and I think he’s grown half a foot this summer. Shadow rouses, runs to meet him, and he leans down to pet her. When they reach us, Jeremiah smiles and says, “Good day, Stephen. I suppose you’ve been hiding with a book somewhere.”