Chapter One
As a child who waded in the head-high grass of our cliffside home, I'd harbored a peculiar fondness for funeral marches—the sight of all those people in one long line, each face holding a memory. Had the tall woman with a book clutched to her chest sat next to the departed on a cracked bench in a one-room schoolhouse? Or had they met in a crowded market when they both reached for the same sun-ripened orange?
Those lives I could only touch with my eyes—their bodies show and lean with grief—slipped into the trees that reached over the road that stretched north to Hemmings Field. A bitter name when nothing grew there but stones carved with the names of the dead.
Such were the wonders of my early childhood. |
