The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Author:Karen Thompson Walker [Walker, Karen Thompson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385676656
Amazon: 0385676654
Publisher: Anchor Canada
Published: 2013-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

My grandfather was in the midst of some kind of project when we arrived. Every cupboard was open, the insides bare. The shelves had been cleared of heirlooms, the mantels stripped of knickknacks. The pantry had been hollowed out, and the kitchen drawers hung open, drooping toward the linoleum.

“That was quick,” said my grandfather when he saw me. The screen door bounced on the frame behind me. He turned the bolt hard in its lock. I’d never seen him lock that door before. “You okay?”

“I guess so,” I said.

Outside, my father’s tires ground the gravel of the driveway. He was headed to the hospital to be with my mother.

“Not a scratch on you,” said my grandfather. His hair, milky white, was sticking up like tufts of weeds, and he was wearing what he called his work clothes: faded denim overalls and a green flannel shirt. “If you’re hungry, I’ll make you some tuna fish.”

It was still bright outside, but my grandfather’s house was dark. The curtains were closed, the interior dimly lit by a few yellow lamps.

My grandfather shuffled through the gloom and into the dining room, where the contents of the whole house had been spread out on every flat surface. The dark top of the dining table was arrayed with treasures laid out in rows, as if for sale. A line of cardboard packing boxes waited on the floor, half full.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.

He’d taken a seat at the table and was leafing through a stack of antique postcards.

“Am I going somewhere?” he said. He looked at me, his eyes faint and watery, a disappearing blue. “Where would I go?”

On the table stood his collections of ancient Coke bottles, sea glass, and sand dollars. My grandmother’s silver tea service, dull from lack of polish, was ringed by a team of dusty porcelain figurines, beside which lay a decorative knife from Alaska, its handle carved from the ivory tusk of a whale. At the far end of the table, towers of limited-edition coins shimmered in their cases, each one packed in plastic, never circulated.

“Then what are you doing?” I asked.

He pressed a magnifying glass hard on the bottom of a faded postcard. His eyes had been clouding over for years, leaving him with a patchwork kind of vision.

“Do me a favor,” he said, tapping the card with a thick index finger. “Tell me what that says.”

The photograph had been artificially colorized, the hillsides painted green, the rooftops an unrealistic red.

“ ‘Childer, Alaska,’ ” I read out. “Nineteen fifty-six.”

“See this hill here?” he said, tracing a bulge of earth that loomed above a cluster of houses and steeples. “A year later, this whole ridge came sliding down in a storm.”

In some distant corner of the neighborhood, firecrackers began to whistle and pop—it was New Year’s Eve, after all. Daylight was radiating beneath the hems of the curtains. In here, the air smelled like dust and Listerine.

“I was at a wedding when it happened,” he continued. “Twenty-three people were buried alive.

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