“Bless him,” said the girl.
“Don’t you think, sister,” Tom pondered, “don’t you think mother perhaps was like that?”
“Of course she was, Tom. What other model have I got? I can’t really remember. Seeing I was three when you were born. Knowing father I bet mother didn’t nurse you except in a locked closet. But how else do I understand? And I do!”
“I can’t remember her at all.”
“I either. All one remembers home is father.”
Tom got up. “Prayer time, I reckon.”
They chose a close recess of little cedars, they hid the model and came away.
The woods straggled down into elders and a last thick cordon of callow poplars. Here was a field. It was untilled and ragged with brown hillocks and hollows. They passed their cow, tossing her tail. The breeze of the end of day glided under their feet, scattered through the field, swung up above the margin of trees. Near the house was no tree. An unpainted barn: a well with hood awry on a flag of shale....
Cornelia and Tom joined their brother and sisters filling the dim room with their thoughts and their bodies. Up to the flecked, stained ceiling their presence filled it. The room made them one. The empty chair that faced them on which lay the Bible made them a body lacking a head. Their shoulders were sharp against each other. Their eyes did not meet, save in the empty chair. Fear was the mold of the room, making them one. Fear also corroded them, shredded them apart, turned them into what each was: Clarence and Ruth and Laura, Cornelia and Tom.
The Reverend Mr. Rennard was very late. His empty chair grew emptier. The Bible faded. The room was losing its submissive creature. It was bleak, it was larger and less alive. The ceiling went up and the vagrant thoughts of them who waited went less to the ceiling, flew out of the window. Outdoors came in. The chirp of a cricket, the minor-third of a frog in the far marsh, the undulant sighing of trees losing the sun—came into the room. The charm was gone. The empty chair was a chair. The One was a group, jarred apart....