Natural History by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

I DON’T KNOW what went on in town those first few days. I didn’t see the reporters chasing the story or the neighbors my parents turned away. I was seventeen; I had a snail named Samuel who lived in a jar with a bit of dirt from the forest; I wore hand-me-downs and had odd habits and not many friends. Until that summer, my family had kept me busy, in both good ways and bad. For the week after the accident, almost all I did was sleep.

In my dreams, I was running up the path at the side of the Glen, picking grapes on Bully Hill, driving a buggy, swimming under the dock. I was at school, under Aunt Henrietta’s watchful eye; I was dressing one of the twins; I was flipping pancakes or lifting grapes from crates and repacking them into baskets. I was dancing. I was skating near the hotel where the parties were held; I was ducking one little sister into the water or walking the shore with another. But when I woke, I was always in bed, both legs and one arm stiffly casted, my head bandaged, the left side of my mouth and face sliced past the cheekbone to the place where a chunk of my scalp was gone.

This was during the grape harvest of 1913, when everyone in the village was busy and accidents at the wineries—a hand caught in a crusher, a full crate dropped onto a foot—were so common that the doctor was already working night and day. My right thigh and left shin were broken; I’d fallen twelve feet when the aeroplane scraped me from the canvas hangar. Where the wing hit—I’d raised my right arm—both bones broke between wrist and elbow, and also some ribs, but because my arm had partly shielded my head, the propeller slashed my face at an angle instead of hitting straight on. I couldn’t see because of the bandage over my nicked eyelids, but the doctor said my eyes weren’t damaged and I wasn’t blind. Bluntly, and too soon, he also said that Link had crashed his machine after hitting us, but he was alive and not badly hurt. Raney’s friends, the two Navy lieutenants who’d pulled us up onto the ridgepole, had walked away with cuts and bruises. Raney was dead.

I slept, woke, slept and woke again: and still, Raney was dead. I dreamed about the red silk wings of the first flying machine I ever saw, rising briefly above the frozen lake. I dreamed I was flying a glider, and then that Constantine Boyd, a little boy I knew, had built me my own aeroplane. I dreamed that my father brought me black kid boots, as elegant as Raney’s, magically fitting my swollen feet—and I dreamed about Raney, a large fair girl with straight hair hardly darker than champagne. The first time I’d seen her, she was sitting on the dock of her family’s summer place, talking with her friends as I watched my sisters at the town beach.

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