Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

The pages, worn and brittle and stained, contain no astounding insights, no solutions, no revelations. They contain no generalizations, no overview of life in the valley before the reservoir, no statistics, no assessments, no blame. Nine short paragraphs, written in a wavering hand and widely spaced. The words are Da’s, but as Henry sits down and begins to copy them, the voice he hears is Brendan’s.

The Paradise Valley was 13 miles long and 4 miles wide at the base. The eastern branch, where we lived, was less than a mile across. Our nearest neighbor, Timothy Dana, made excellent cheese.

We had pigs, cows, and chickens at our place. We raised berries, potatoes, apples, corn, and four kinds of winter squash. I had a pig each year, a pet crow, three black Labs, and Flossie. Flossie had to be put down in 1911.

I met Eileen for the first time outside the feed store in Pomeroy. Her hair was as dark and shiny as Flossie’s coat and parted in the center. She wore it in two long braids, wrapped twice around her head like a crown. Her eyes were blue and her feet were small. She was standing with her father that day.

Her father had a red face and enormous shoulders, but I was taller than him. He never stopped hating me. He brought Eileen and her sister and his wife over from Ireland when Eileen was four, and he worked at the sawmill. He was jealous of our land — we had a large place even without the woodlot, which I bought in 1926.

Brendan’s birth went very easily, but there was a blizzard when Frank junior was born and the doctor couldn’t get to us. Neither could my mother or hers or any of our neighbors. Frank junior was breeched and Eileen was in labor for two days. She told me to do what I did with the calves, but when I reached to turn the baby, I couldn’t get my hand inside. I tried to turn him with my fingers. When he came out he was folded up like a lamb, bent at the waist with his legs against his chest, his face on his knees, his feet and arms over his head. I thought he was dead at first. Later he was a good-looking boy. Eileen was sick for a long time, and we had marital relations very seldom after that.

The apple trees in the orchard were planted before I was born and were 51 years old when we left the valley. We had Wine-saps, Jonathans, Granny Smiths, and a yellow kind Eileen made good pies from. I can’t remember the name of those. The petals fell off the trees in the spring and floated on the pond and scared the cows. That was the pond where Brendan almost drowned.

My father let William Benson keep his beehives under our apple trees. In return, William gave us some of his honey each year. The honeycomb was brittle and delicate, and I kept the wax in my mouth after I sucked the honey out. The wax had no real flavor, but it smelled of apple blossoms and something else, maybe pollen.

Frank junior used to follow Brendan everywhere, but he didn’t follow Brendan into the abbey and I was grateful that I’d been left with one son — the right one, even; Frank was the hardy one. Now I wish he’d followed Brendan in. Brendan looks awful but at least he’s alive. I should have made Frank come to Coreopsis with us.

Our neighbors were Timothy Dana, whose family had lived in the valley forever; the Bourdins and the Gendreaus, French Canadians who came down around the time my grandfather did; and the Gregorys, who came from Ireland when I was a boy. And the monks, of course. On quiet spring evenings after a rain, we could hear them chanting when we went to milk the cows. The whole valley lay under a mist. Some of the shrubs were hinting at green, and the fields had thawed and turned black. The willows were yellow near the pond. The colors seemed very bright against the mist, and through the air, so softly we could not be sure we heard it, came the sound of the men chanting to welcome in the night.

Andrea Barrett

lives in Rochester, New York. She is the author of Ship Fever, a collection of short stories which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1996, and of the much acclaimed The Voyage of the Narwhal and The Middle Kingdom, both of which are available from HarperCollins.