Then Sings My Soul by Amy K. Sorrells

Author:Amy K. Sorrells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Genocide, Social Justice, Ukraine, Dementia, Ageism, Gerontology
Publisher: David C. Cook
Published: 2015-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

A brother?

Jakob had never mentioned a brother. Nel couldn’t remember a time he’d talked about his parents, for that matter. Catherine never mentioned anyone either, besides Jakob’s parents on occasion, and mostly about how they’d built the lake house and passed it down in their will to him. Maybe it had been a generational thing that he had never wanted to talk much about them, or anything, for that matter. But maybe there was more, and that’s what Catherine was trying to find out before she died.

How could Nel continue with that research? She hardly knew where to begin besides the envelope with the ship manifest. She couldn’t stop thinking about the names.

Peter Maevski, 14.

Jakob Maevski, 5.

The boys in the photo had to be her father and who she now knew was his older brother. It made sense for Peter to have passed away already, but when? And how? How had they come to America? And why had they come alone?

All kinds of scenarios were running through her mind, but she’d have to look into it more later. She would ask Mattie about it all—maybe Catherine had confided in her about what she was looking for. In the meantime, she had to finish her prototypes and that bracelet.

As Nel finished setting up the supplies and equipment Matthew had sent her, she admired how Jakob had arranged his lapidary worktable to catch the daylight as the sun moved from east to west. The long table had a view of several bird feeders hanging from the sycamores and river birch, and the lake beyond that. On one end of the table sat a Facetron machine. Across the back wall, he had placed several multidrawered metal boxes. On the other end sat old coffee cans full of tweezers and dop sticks, wax and needles, and gem-finishing tools of all kinds. Various sizes of plastic containers—former ice cream, cottage cheese, and salt buckets—and stacks of cigar boxes labeled with the names of raw stones rested beneath the table.

Nel picked a chunk of quartz off the windowsill, crystals jutting in different directions. She blew the dust off it. “You and your rocks, Dad.” She smiled, thinking of the hundreds of times she sat by his side as he worked the Facetron machine, sketched designs, and examined each rock for the perfect angle of cuts with his loupe on one eye.

She picked up a squared-off, deep-green stone from a coffee tin full of them and studied the lines Jakob had drawn on it with pencil. “Only someone with a heart for the stone can see the best angle to make the first cut. Someone who loves the stone well. Who takes time to get to know it. Who’s not afraid to feel the edges and get close to it. Who sees beyond the dirt and finds the precise section that will most reflect and refract light,” he’d explained over the years.

Collections of uncut stones called roughs peeked from beneath the lids of their overfilled cigar

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