Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Read Free Page B

says to Annie. “Religious symbols stand for moral values. The symbols are still useful, even if the religion is not.”
    Annie shakes her head.
    “You don’t understand?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Come here.” Isabelle leads Annie over to the box. “Look.” She slides the cover from the small hole in the wood and makes Annie look through it. “See. The Angel of Death is helping the dead boy out of this life. He is a passage between this world and the idea of another world. He is a sense of possibility. A looking up. A wonderment. An angel does not just belong to God. It is a feeling in us. A striving.” Isabelle’s voice is airy, lifts with her excitement at what she is saying. “When I have made this photograph, I want it to be that feeling of looking up. When I show it to people, that’s what I want them to feel—the possibilities that could exist beyond this life.” She pauses, puts her hand lightly on Annie’s shoulder. “Do you see?” she says.
    Isabelle has sent Tobias and Alfred home in a fly with Wilks. Back to their mother’s house in Tunbridge Wells. She sits on the bench with the black cloth behind her, poking stray feathers back into the goose wings. Tobias and Alfred. They are not obedient enough because they know her, feel they can play when they come here instead of work, don’t understand what it is she is doing. Trying to do, thinks Isabelle, threading the bone of a feather through the weave of the wing. What I am trying to do. It is so frustrating. Her ideas are sound, she is sure of that. What is it that happens between her idea and the finished result? What goes wrong? It is as though the moment she sets up a scene it starts to leak away. The image in her head burns brighter, is true. When she looks through the viewfinder of the camera, she sees her image coming undone, trailing threads of smoke, disappearing. How to make it stay. What will hold it until she is able to render it completely?
    Isabelle looks up at the lens of the camera. It is supposed to see what she sees, that is the point. It is supposed to be her eyes.
    The afternoon light is beautiful now. It slants into the henhouse, all current and moving lines. The air swims with light. That is the half of it, thinks Isabelle, bending over the white feathers. Light. The rest is shape and shadow. Intent. The raised arm that curves up out of the frame is the heart leaping forward, is the moment before arrival and the quickening of anticipation.
    Isabelle puts the wings aside and walks over to the wall of the henhouse. There are still boards against the glass and bits of straw wedged in the steel supports from when the hens were there. Now they have eggs delivered from the farm down the road instead. The branches of the trees through the glass, the trees in the orchard, look like lacing pulling together a corset of sky. Apples. That’s what the painters do. Mounds of apples and lemons. A blue jug of wine. Still life. Isabelle puts her hand up to the glass. Now she is a tree against the sky.
    The budding apples are higher up the trees than she’d expected. The fallen ones from last year still on the ground, a brown, pulpy mass. Wilks probably hasn’t been down here in ages. There isn’t a single ladder or climbing aid anywhere. Isabelle manages to haul herself up onto a low branch of one tree and stretching up high into the boughs she is able to get to the apples. They are small, but she finds a nice, round, red one, and another with a couple of leaves still attached to the stem. But what to do with them? She can’t throw them out of the tree as they might break or bruise when they hit the ground. Isabelle stands in the apple tree, holding the two apples, her feet on one branch, her body angled into the trunk of the tree. There are twigs probing her, and the bark is rough against her cheek. All around there is the soft hum of bees and the warm smell of last year’s apples running to earth.
    Isabelle puts the apples down the front