The Remnants by Robert Hill

Author:Robert Hill [Hill, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A novel of endings
Publisher: Forest Avenue Press
Published: 2016-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

A person cannot undo the turnings of time anymore than a rock can throw itself. True Bliss took to wearing her braid as a lariat roping her head, grayer as the years advanced, tighter as each new season for jack-in-the-pulpits bloomed and spent. The Lope girls came to accept their unloveliness as a tree split by lightning finds the wherewithal to go on, and as long as the sap flowed through their veins they could endure the scars and gnarls that erupted on their limbs.

Even after True had given Threesie the pink velvet ribbon from the night she never went to a dance, and Threesie promised to always cherish it, to never lose it, to never give it away, only to claim so many years later that she misplaced it who-knows-where, True never would be certain that her friend was really her friend. All of life was puss in the corner to Threesie Lope, a fakeout that got another mouse trapped, and True suspected that as far as Threesie was concerned, maybe Frainey had a point about the Lopes and their animal heritage, and that deep down in the cesspool of the Lope family genes, all cute little mice were really rats.

Threesie was slippery with another feint, too, a fooling, a fakeout behind True’s back. She was careful to keep secret that once a year she helped Mawz Engersol keep a mourner’s ritual, out on the ridge above Grunts Pond where he had built a mound of boulders over the tomb of Bull and horse. Once a year on the anniversary of his father’s spooking, Mawz would roll another stone over the hole to force the bones down lower. Threesie hoped to win him over at last; she helped him pick jack-in-the-pulpits to lay upon the rocks to rot, and following his lead, she dug down deep in the pit of her feelings for him and ushered onto the spot her spit to join his. In thirty years of silent service, she hoped Mawz would finally say to her the words she longed to hear from him, but he never did say boo. Instead she only heard him utter one sentiment ever, and he’d say it every year, over and over, to the bones beneath the stones: if only it wasn’t true … if only it wasn’t True … if only it wasn’t: True. Threesie didn’t need a prospector’s map to understand the lode buried in that claim. She had horse sense enough to accept when she’d been pussed. Mawz was forever on the threshold of True’s front porch with jack-in-the-pulpits in a mound to take her in his arms to a dance. He was never more than a stone’s throw from that night all those summers ago. And no one had been more careful in all the years since to keep True away from the man who broke her heart than this man who broke her heart. Such a hard rock was his fidelity to True that it finally beat Threesie’s heart into something approaching human.

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