All the Voices Cry Read Free Page A

illusion of flexibility recalled her desire to share her streams and woods with Hugh, but when she looked at the bent reed, she also remembered how hard it was to share Hugh.
    Later in the day, she woke Hugh from a nap, sat on the edge of the bed, spread out her hands on her knees, placed her ultimatum before him.
    â€œI’m not cooking any more,” she said.
    â€œI never said you had to.”
    â€œI don’t want you sleeping in the cabin any more.”
    â€œI’ll leave if you want me to, Jan.”
    â€œNo, you must stay, but stay in the Bunkie. I’m not leaving you.” It was all she had left to say. She could forgive Hugh for Crispin. Perhaps Hugh had discovered some great and good love in himself with Crispin that he had never experienced with her. She even told herself that she could stop desiring Hugh, if that was what he wanted, but she could not stop caring.
    They did not see a couples therapist, but they did see an architect; “the architect of our separation,” she called the rotund little man in his office tower of reflecting glass. They renamed the main cabin the “Ruche” or hive, and constructed a network of simple buildings, half hidden in the bedrock or up on stilts, with shutters that hid the windows, and ferns that grew upon the roof. Fireplaces and rock ledges jutted out into the sitting rooms, and the buildings were joined by walkways with holes cut in them to accommodate the growth of the trees.

    Jan built herself a studio where she worked on her photographs with an intensity that surprised her. Her subjects were clouds, trees, reflections. She made photo essays of the barns and shrines in the rural community around the lake, but she rarely took pictures of people. The only face for her remained Hugh’s. He had a half-smile of such infinite sweetness, made the sweeter by his capacity to withhold it. She marked every day of their separation with a photograph: ice in the reeds, the coal-bright sparks on the lichen stalks, the water droplets that filled the lichen goblets to the brim.
    Â 
    And so the years had passed. During the summers, they lived in a scattered way among the trees, with Crispin, without Crispin, with Crispin again. And little by little Hugh’s skin took on the transparency of age, and little by little, Jan’s photographs became all the same. Up on the cliff top, with the empty container in her hand, Jan saw how she had lorded it over Hugh in her ownership of the paradise, and somewhere she had lost the natural line of herself, the line that swirled, was elastic and cut on the grain. Glorying in the idea of doing what she said she would do, she had given Hugh a place to stay, always, and in her stubbornness she had made chains for them both.
    She had done what she said she would do. She had shared. By God, she shared everything that she had, and now when she finally had it all to herself, the wind lifting the roof in the old cabin, the rattle of flies against the glass in the studio, she found that she did not want it.

    Perhaps Hugh had been right in his insistence that there should be nothing left to mark his passage in the world: no child, no artwork, no monument, nothing. Let the cabin and the studio on stilts fall into a careless teepee of boards in the forest, and beneath it a stained kapok mattress, its sodden insides spilling out into the leaf mould. Maybe there is no virtue, after all, in doing what you said you were going to do. Gone were the days of Frédérique lifting her chiffon scarves to the poplars. Jan shrugged. Now Hugh was gone too, and what was the point of holding on to anything? The time had come to pull her resentment out of herself, this anchor of hatred and love, and the gobbet of flesh that it was attached to. Up came the cable, dripping and straining, encrusted with zebra mussels and streaming weed. Mentally she flung it off the cliff after the ashes, left it to coil like a dead snake caught in a