One Came Home Read Free Page B

Minnesota. Minnesota was so far away Agatha might never come home again.
    *  *  *
    Perhaps Billy asked her
, I thought as I loaded ammunition into the Springfield.
But if he did, she must have said no. There were no engagements announced in January
. I lined up the rifle, pulled the trigger, and nailed the brown bottle directly in the middle of the label. It disintegrated.
    I loaded another cartridge, took aim, and shot. I repeated the process again and again. Every once in a while, I imagined mourners gathering in our home, asking after me. I was glad to be far away, sitting by the river with a rifle nestled in my shoulder. One by one, I let the bright, crisp sound of shattering bottles clear my head.
    I shot the last bottle, set the gun down, and went to line more up.
    As I sat on my stump, I noticed my list. It said “For Journey” and nothing else. I picked up the pencil and wrote the one thing I knew I needed. Then I let the pencil drop and laid my hand on the rifle.
    While I fired at bottles, the last good conversation I’d had with Agatha came to mind. It was the middle of May. This was after I’d seen her kiss Billy and ten days before she left. In light of what happened later, the conversation seemed rife with portent, but I did not see it then.
    Agatha had been giving me the silent treatment for my big mouth, but that night:
    “Georgie?”
    Agatha’s voice. I pivoted to see.
    Agatha smiled. She patted the bed. I knew what thatmeant, even though she hadn’t done it since I was eight or so. I jumped into the center and arranged myself cross-legged. She climbed up and kneeled behind me. She undid my braids. Then she rested one hand on the crown of my head and used the other to drag a brush through my hair. Tingling ran through my body. I closed my eyes. It was going to be all right now. She’d forgiven me. I knew it.
    “There was once a wise old man who lived by himself in a forest lodge …,” Agatha began.
    In my mind, tree trunks lined up side by side and branches wove into a roof.
    “In the afternoons, the man liked to sit and think. He thought about everything—animals, trees, birds, insects, plants, and people. He thought about how things worked, and why things happened, and where each living creature belonged in this world. Because he spent so much time thinking, he became the wisest person in his village.…”
    “This is a story about you,” I crowed. Agatha never could tell a story that wasn’t somehow about herself, and Agatha
could
go on and on about the natural world.
    Agatha tugged harder on the brush. “It’s from the Seneca. Most of it, anyway.”
    I pretended I hadn’t said a thing and sat stock-still. The brush resumed its slow descent through my hair.
    “One afternoon, as this man sat thinking, a white pigeon flew into his lodge and landed on the man’s stool. Now, this was no ordinary pigeon. Instead, it was a messenger sent fromanother people, much greater than the wise old man and those in his village. The old man watched the pigeon, waiting. The white pigeon blinked at him with one eye, twitched, blinked at him with the other eye, and then spoke: ‘As a token of respect, the Council of Birds has decided to give a gift from my kind, the pigeons. Each spring, man will seek the wild pigeons. They will take some of the young and leave the adults. In summer, fall, and winter, man will leave the pigeons alone.’
    “The wise old man bowed and then rushed out of his lodge to tell the people. When he returned, the white pigeon was gone, except for one white feather that rested in the middle of the floor. The old man picked it up and studied it. As he did so, he saw another feather near a window ledge. He walked to that feather and picked it up, and saw a feather just outside. And so the wise old man walked from one feather to the next right out of his village. Feather by feather he picked out his path.”
    Agatha paused.
    I turned around and blurted what I’d been thinking: