over their fields and the weedy margins beside the roads. He promised to show them what he found, to give right of first refusal. Daniel dug gently and meticulously refilled the small excavations. Once he found a button from the uniform of a Hessian soldier; the family didn’t want it. He turned it over to the historical society.
No one minded Joy’s birding. Occasionally a child tagged along. What do you do with the birds after you’ve seen them? Joy explained her life-list in the back of the Peterson’s guide.
When, as now, hunting season made fields and forests dangerous, they prospected for birds and treasures in the protected zone of parkland around the lake. Beach Closed proclaimed the sign. Canoes lay chained and padlocked under the eaves of the concession stand; a layer of rough ice covered the water. The sand the rangers carted in each summer crunched underfoot, riddled with frost crystals. Ordinarily she could have left him on the beach, headed into the woods, and taken the woods trail around the lake. She would have enjoyed finding him again, afterward, refreshed by the break in togetherness.
But this morning the clock ticked back in Pittsburgh; the sand ran through the hourglass. The woman Joy had never met lay in the room Joy had never visited.
He hadn’t turned the metal detector on. It lay on the sand like a discarded toy, an inert and powerless divining rod.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She exhaled a cloud of breath. “Do you want to call Monica?”
“I can’t put it on her. Or you, for that matter.”
Hunched against the wind he walked away. Joy almost followed but held back.
For once, she thought, Daniel needs to be alone.
He stopped by the stand of brittle phragmites and gazed at the lake.
Frozen drizzle stung her cheeks. Daniel needed her permission to give up. He might be able to let Selma go, and not blame himself too harshly, believing he’d done it for Joy, for the sake of their shared future. Joy could take the rap for him.
But what would happen to the two of them without Selma? Her absent presence held everything in balance, permitted Joy and Daniel’s relationship to persist; forestalled or at least obscured the likelihood of entropy, of conflict, deterioration, and disorder. Removing Selma would disrupt their closed system, expose Joy’s limited supply of energy and warmth.
He started back along the shore. She lifted the binoculars and twisted the eyepieces into focus to bring him close. Framed in her sights he appeared bruised with fatigue, old. Unable to bear it, she lowered the glasses.
I love him, Joy realized. The exception that proves the rule: loved him more than she’d believed herself capable.
Joy walked to meet him.
Mute, he shook his head. His eyes burned blank with anguish.
Joy cupped his face in her gloved hands. “You can say no. Tell them to keep her comfortable, but no treatment. Call Monica. Go home.”
A quiet, jagged sob escaped him.
“I love you,” she said.
She rested against his rough wool coat. Already Joy sensed a shift in their specific gravity—the ratio of her density to his, weighed in air.
Faith and Practice
Dorothy Shaw sat beside her husband Grayson, headmaster of Clear Spring Friends School, on the Elders’ bench at the front of the Meeting House. His long fingers gripping his knees warned her. He was about to speak.
“I am wrestling with Spirit. True witness to peace must go beyond prayer. Action is called for. Civil disobedience. This Meeting must join in the effort to send medical supplies to North Vietnam. We must defy the government.”
The members of Clear Spring Meeting disagreed over how far they should go in putting the Quaker peace testimony into practice; the Meeting was at war with itself. Grayson sided with the activists, the radical members of the Meeting. Although he was descended from one of Clear Spring’s founding families, Dorothy worried that his provocative stance could alienate weighty Friends. The school was already in financial distress and needed the continued support of the Meeting.
Eight years earlier in this same room, Grayson had issued a different kind of challenge: “We of this Meeting are called to found a school.” He’d persuaded Anna White, last in an old family, to donate her orchard and overgrown fields. At the regional Yearly Meeting, Grayson canvassed until enough money was promised to break ground. Clear Spring Friends School rose out of the fields across the road from the house where he had grown up, and where he and Dorothy still made their home.
At first, she’d just helped in the office. This role expanded into her present variegated one: admissions, counseling, discipline, surrogate mother to the boarding students. She could hardly tell where the job ended and she began. Peace in Vietnam was abstract compared to the welfare of the school. But Grayson was weary of the school’s daily demands, restless. He’d been offered a job with a new peace organization, a radical splinter from the established Friends Service Committee. Dorothy had insisted he turn the offer down, telling him it was wrong to abandon the school before it was stronger. “You could run the school without me,” he’d said. “No,” she’d replied. Even after seventeen years, she was still an outsider in Clear Spring.
Now a student stood up in the balcony—Todd, a boarder from Florida. “This place is a bunch of hypocrites. All this crap about peace. They kicked my friend out of school this week. He’s eighteen. He’ll be drafted. Go ahead, send medicine to the Viet Cong. Send my buddy to war.” He stamped downstairs and outside.
Todd’s friend had been suspended twice the year before, for smoking. This time it was marijuana. “Strike three,” Grayson had said, and expelled him. Dorothy was relieved to have him gone, though she hated losing his tuition.
There were nervous coughs as the Meeting settled back into expectant silence after the boy’s outburst. To quiet her mind, Dorothy studied the plain, beautiful room, looking up at the heavy beam across the center of the Meeting House ceiling where the partition between men and women had been two hundred years ago. How shocked Grayson’s ancestors would be at her students sitting in the balcony, holding hands. Across the room, the old glass in the windows warped the light, spreading it across the white plaster wall like a watermark on paper.
The benches creaked; the clock ticked. At the end of the hour, the clerk of the Meeting initiated the customary ripple of handshakes. Meeting was over; next came announcements.
“I’m driving down to the vigil,” said Bruce Williams, the biology teacher. “Several students have already signed up. If anyone wants to go, we’ll leave in the school van after coffee.” Bruce drove to the silent vigil in front of the White House every Sunday. Sometimes Dorothy joined him.
Grayson scoffed at vigils. He said they were cheap and easy, too passive to truly convey resistance. “So how would you suggest we teach the children to bear witness for peace? Pour blood on files? Immolate ourselves?” she retorted. No one in Clear Spring had known the Quaker who recently had set himself alight in front of the Pentagon, but the tragic gesture haunted her.
From the broad porch of the Meeting House she watched a phalanx of honking geese fly overhead. There was smoke in the air, burning leaves. Standing here last April, after the impromptu Meeting called the night Martin
