Homestead by Melinda Moustakis

Author:Melinda Moustakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

* * *

HE HAD WOKEN UP to crawling on his skin, nothing there but a sheet and quilt, and waited for his bearings, and the trembling to ease, and while he shoveled snow he found comfort in the weight of a load being moved, in the path uncovered. But there is a pain and guilt, a voice that says that he should not be here, his father made a petition and he returned home a son. And there were so many sons who were lost. At least his misery was a penance back when he had nothing on the farm, before he moved north. So having a cabin, a wife, is a burden, even if for so long he was without. And his father did not know everything, he could not bring himself to admit that he was a coward, in the war, marching on foreign soil. Dirt, he knows, and it knows him.

He has not replied to his father’s last letter. So he sits down to write, and maybe reveal what he has kept to himself since the war, but his hand hovers over the paper after I have something to tell you. He imagines his father’s face, the pained furrow of his brow, and he writes instead that they are going to have a child. And he does not tell him what Marie asked of him, in a way he does not believe it himself.

Marie turns from the stove and peers over his shoulder. He covers his words as if he has written what he was thinking.

“I thought you would’ve told him by now,” she says.

“Got behind,” says Lawrence.

“Tell him we miss him,” she says.

“I’ll write that from you,” says Lawrence.

“Let me write it,” says Marie. “He’d like that.”

Because Marie told him that Sheila had a hard time hearing the news about her being with child, and suspected she would not visit or write back for a while, Lawrence gives her the pen. She sits down and takes the last page. When she is done, he, without looking at her note, folds and tucks the letter away in the envelope.

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