Whisper Read Free Page B

was no better than my own voice, but I had heard the music from the radio. I knew what the violin was capable of creating. I slowed down, took a deep breath, tried not to let the baby’s renewed cries make me so shaky. I whispered the lyrics in my mind and fumbled my way through the tune, pressing my left fingers to the strings and drawing the bow with my right. After a few minutes of fumbling, the song became recognizable.
    Corinna, Corinna
    time for the baby to eat.
    Milk in the morning
    at noon ripened wheat
    at night soft dates,
    acorns from the trees,
    dandelion fluff
    on the quiet evening breeze.
    I listened to the notes and pictured my mother holding me, rocking me, caressing my head with her hand. She would tuck my black hair behind my ears and smooth the strands over my head. I remembered the feel of her palms, rough and calloused but also beautiful and loving. I remembered the sound of her voice, so deep, full and true. The violin began to take on those tones as I played the simple tune over and over. When I felt the warm notes winging around the hut, I opened my eyes.
    The baby was asleep. So was Eva. She had crept in while I was playing and now lay in front of the door, her left hand under her cheek, her swollen right hand wrapped in a white cloth and clutched against her chest.
    I played the lullaby again.

    The baby’s sharp, desperate cries startled me awake four times in the night, my hands trembling from lack of sleep. I dripped more water into her mouth; I held her against my shoulder and patted the gas from her stomach. This child would not be another mound in the graveyard, not if I could find something to fill her, something that could replace mother’s milk.
    The third time she woke me up, when the moon had already crossed the opening between the trees above our huts, I heard a keening so sad and mournful I wanted to cry along with the baby. I wrapped her tightly against my chest and walked silently through the woods, down the path to the creek, the sad song pushing against my nose, making it drip.
    He didn’t hear me when I padded up behind him. The baby was quiet now, satisfied with the sound of my heart, and I squatted on my heels where I could see him, a shadow on the branch over the swimming hole. Nathanael was like a grasshopper, his arms bent at the elbows, his knees angled out, his feet hooked around each other under the branch.
    He played a song as lonely and sad as an owl at night. My throat tightened, and I sat in the mud of the path. This was the song of a broken heart, and I suddenly understood Nathanael a little better. I’d always thought that he hated the village we were from, hated the city, and chose to live with us because it was his best option. But Nathanael had had other options, and they must have vanished.
    When he pulled the bow over the strings one last time, the lingering notes floating across the water like the dragonflies, I opened my eyes, stood and slipped back down the path. I knew now that Nathanael had known love and it had disappeared like dew on the grass. Nathanael had told us so little about himself that I’d always thought of him as our father, single, satisfied.
    I heard him creep into my hut, replace the violin in its case and drop the deerskin door back into place. I slept after that, for a few hours anyway, until the baby’s piercing cries woke me again. I slept with an ache now, an ache that food could not fill.

    In the morning, Eva climbed up the great pine by our camp. There was a large macaw’s nest in an open cavity halfway up the trunk. Eva believed there were babies in that opening. Jeremia refused to let her climb the tree because he remembered me at seven, when I’d climbed up for no reason other than because I could and had become stuck. I’d stayed up in that tree all day long. Rosa, my mentor at the time, had stood below the pine, her arms across her chest, refusing to let anyone help me down.
    â€œYou got up