Bloodroot: a Novel by Robert F. Jones

Author:Robert F. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781634500180
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2015-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

“Laura,” Mark Avery called softly. “There’s something I want to show you.”

He heard her get up heavily, almost dutifully, from the living-room couch where she had been reading and pad into the kitchen. She was feeling her pregnancy and he felt guilty. He handed her the 7x40 power Swift Skipper binoculars and pointed up to the top of the meadow. It was dusk and in the low, blue-green light the shapes of six deer stood out warm and coppery-brown. Their graceful necks arched as they grazed at the edge of the oak grove. Laura took the binoculars—dutifully again, it seemed to Mark—and looked at them. He watched her closely. When her lips widened into a pleased smile, he put his arm around her shoulders.

“Oh,” she said, “how beautiful! I can see their eyes.”

She had been moody since her return from New York two months ago. At first Mark had written it off to the baby—after all, a woman felt the commitment much more deeply than a man, much as he might try to empathize. She hadn’t been bitchy, nothing like that. Just . . . remote. He tried to cheer her by taking active, muscular interest in her vegetable garden—weeding the beds and building a rock retaining wall around the lower edge, watering the thirsty tomatoes and talking heartily about how good they would taste when they ripened. But they never did. The first frost, in late August, turned them pale pink on the vine. At night he tried to love her, but her response was shallow. Again he thought: the baby.

He even cut back on his fishing, despite the fact that he was now seeing more and bigger trout in the brook than he had in the spring. Nor did he practice anymore with the shotgun. He knew that disturbed her. (But the lack of practice didn’t really matter, he knew. He was indeed a quick study: now he could pick a starling from the air with a simple swing and slap on the trigger: a starling—Shakespeare’s bird—pelting along like a mini-duck, turned to a blown dandelion of shot-ripped feathers just . . . like . . . that.)

Yet she remained remote.

Perhaps it had been an error to move from the city. She missed her pals, that he knew, her job and her posing, her makeup, the restaurants, the boutiques, the watching herself on television—just by chance, that night, and the night after—and she missed making the money. Yes, the money.

But where did you draw the line?

She wanted the baby. At least as much as he. More than he, if the truth be told. Oh, sure, he wanted to be a daddy, but he couldn’t for a moment visualize—if he was honest with himself—what it would feel like. Yet she had a feeling about it. A preconceptual feeling. (He hated himself for the pun.)

For him childbearing occurred each day, with his painting. Now he knew it was what he should have been doing all his life: taking the world

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