Peter Loon Read Free Page A

of tenderness from his father rose up like a grasping hand and clutched Peter’s heart and his throat, and he backed away, almost frightened by the fierce emotion that threatened to overtake him.
    â€œPeter?” called his youngest brother Amos from their bed. It seemed hard, leaving his brothers and sisters like this. He sensed that they found him a comforting presence, with their father gone and their mother so ghostlike. “Peter?” came the voice again and Peter answered with a quieting hush .
    He stepped out of the house, onto the short porch. Rosemund Loon–still holding onto her beauty despite her thirty eight years, most of which had been spent in this hard wilderness–tugged at her husband’s coat so that it snugged more closely around her son’s shoulders. She snatched the hat from his hand and put it on his head.
    â€œWhere . . .” he began.
    With a ruthless sort of grip upon his shoulder, she turned him quickly about, and pointed south and east. “He went in that direction.”
    â€œMy uncle?”
    â€œWhen he left, he went in that direction,” she said again.
    â€œBut when?”
    â€œThere can’t be that many people in the world,” she said. “You’re bound to find him, if you look. He went south and east. He could be in the next settlement, for all I know, but I don’t think so. His name is Obed Winslow.”
    â€œWinslow?” Peter had not lost that sense of complete awareness born at his father’s silent side. He drew himself up to his height. “How Winslow?” he said. “What name is Winslow to us? The Winslows in the bottomland over that way?” He pointed west. His sister Sally Ann had taken visits from a young fellow named Job Winslow from that farm.
    â€œHe is an uncle by marriage,” she said. There was a helpless look in her eyes that he had never seen before and he turned away.
    â€œObed Winslow,” he said.
    â€œI need you to find him.” She leaned forward and hugged him with uncharacteristic fervor. “You’re a good boy,” she said, which struck him like a blow to the head. “You’ve always been a good boy, and I know you’ll do well.” Then she turned away, walked in to her dead husband and shut the door behind her.
    Going back into the cabin was impossible. Following her was impossible. Peter was confounded. He struggled to hold onto that awareness he had felt beside his father’s body. He looked southeast; he glanced over his shoulder, but the gable end of the house obscured the moon. It was a chilly fall night, and his breath formed before him in puffs. The sky was cloudless, and what stars or planets there were, gleaming despite the moon, shone like sharp bits of ice. About twenty or so rods to the southeast lay the shadow of the forest.
    Peter had only been to the next settlement, Davistown, half a dozen times in his life, and to Patricktown–further away and more or less directly south–only once. He considered going to the neighbors in the other direction and asking their help to sort things out. Everyone knew his mother was a little mad. Some thought he was a little mad, as well, though he wasn’t supposed to know that. People, he understood, could only keep a secret so long.
    Then who is Obed Winslow? “Uncle Obed,” he said, trying out the name. That sharp, almost painful, awareness seemed to call him from the line of trees to his south. He stepped down from the porch and walked into the moonlight. His father’s coat was warm.
    Out in the stump-strewn field, he stumbled once against an old furrow. Something stirred ahead of him, a small animal, a mouse or a mole, mingling with the remnants of hay, frightened by his unexpected presence. He turned around only once and was urged on by the suspicion of his mother’s face in the single window facing east. In a moment he found the old path in the moonlight and vanished into