Patterns of Swallows Read Free

that lonely for her mother? To have no one that
understood her? Ruth thought it must have been. It was lonely for
Ruth.
    There were few worth spending
her precious thinking time on. Her mother and Wynnie and Bo and
Joshua and Phil – they were the ones who needed to be thought
of. Even if the thoughts weren't always pleasant ones, they were
people who had to be thought about.
    People like Lily Turnbull
weren't worth wasting a thought on, so Ruth tried not to think about
her.
    She couldn't help thinking about
people like Graham MacKellum, though, however much she tried not to.
    She tried to think about her
father sometimes, but she couldn't find much to think about him. She
could remember the swallows, but there wasn't much to think about in
that.

Chapter
2
    In the southeastern corner of
British Columbia, tucked between the Selkirk range on the west and
the rugged Purcells on the east, lies Kissanka Lake, a bright jewel
in a rough setting of mountains and evergreen forest.
    Just south of
Kissanka Lake is an unpretentious uprising of earth that goes by the
pretentious name of Arrow Mountain (more of a large hill, really),
and here the Arrow River (more of a large creek, really) begins. At
the foot of Arrow Mountain and the head of the Arrow River lies our
small town, Arrowhead, named by some punning settler. Arrowhead
(population unknown by me at this moment, but somewhere under five
thousand, I guess) has grown some since the days of this story, but
i n
essentials, it remains very much the same town that Ruth saw that day
through the window of the greyhound bus.
    *
    * *
    The sun was just setting as,
from the steep mountain pass, the bus swooped down upon the Arrowhead
Valley like an eagle dropping from its eyrie. Ruth's eyes, after
their seven-year fast, hungrily took in their fill of the little
town.
    It was late April – nearly
unarguably the most beautiful time of year in Arrowhead. The apple
and cherry orchards were aglow with their earthly glory of seasonal
white and with a heavenly glory of rosy, evening light, reflecting
from the sky.
    The bus took a turn from the
open farm land of the valley and passed A.A. Turnbull Enterprises
sawmill. It wasn't a sight Ruth would normally have relished, but
everything was beautiful to her just then.
    MacKellum Milling – the
rival sawmill, a newer facility and a more attractive one in Ruth's
opinion – inhabited the other side of town. Guy MacKellum had
started the mill himself as an enterprising young man who grew tired
of working for Old Man Turnbull.
    Old Man Turnbull's son, Angus,
ran Turnbulls' after the Old Man died. Angus was Lily's father, and
Guy was Graham's father. These facts may have played a role in
Ruth's preference for the MacKellum sawmill.
    The MacKellums were considered a
good family, but not quite so good as the Turnbulls. Not old money.
Just nice people, really. Nice, hard-working, down-to-earth people.
Everyone liked the MacKellums. Everyone had liked Guy's father when
he'd been alive. Everyone continued to like Guy and his wife. She
was a good-natured woman. A bit tight with her money – that
was the worst that could be said about her. And she managed to carry
that fault in a likeable, laughable kind of way. It was a sort of
family joke.
    And Graham was nice, too. He
moved in Lily Turnbull's circles, but he wasn't like her.
    He was ordinary. You'd never
have called Graham a handsome face. Or a brilliant mind. But we all
thought he was a nice boy.
    I know Ruth thought so. I was
the only person who knew it, but I knew it.
    He'd changed as he grew older,
though. When he grew into his teenage self, he seemed intent on
proving something. To whom, I could never decide.
    But Ruth wasn't there to see the
changes that took place in all of us. By the time she came back, she
was practically a stranger to most of us, and everyone she'd known
was a stranger to her.
    *
    * *
    After Ruth came back, she and
Graham met for the first time again at the dance at