Chapter 161

Malachi

My brother’s son sat down at the table the way my brother used to.

I don’t think he knew he did it. He pulled out the bench with one foot, and sat, and put both hands flat on the wood in front of him, fingers spread, and looked up. Nathaniel had sat like that at every table I ever saw him at. In our father’s kitchen, when we were boys. At the head of the council, the year I was sent away. As if he were holding the table down, and the whole room might lift off if he didn’t.

I stood by the hearth with my back to the fire and looked at that, and it went into me somewhere under the ribs and stayed there.

He had his father’s voice too. Not all of it. Something at the bottom of it. When he had said nobody is arresting anyone today out there in the snow, I had heard Nathaniel in it, as plainly as if he had been standing on the hill.

I didn’t say any of that. It wasn’t mine to say. He was my nephew, and I had given up the right to call him