Good To A Fault Part 35

They looked up at him, surprised. Dolly and Trevor stood too, protesting. They let the blanket fall, but Lorraine folded the ends around herself, knowing Darwin.

"Drive safe on the way back to town," he said, and walked up the bank. Dolly could still see his hand waving at them for a while, above the haze and smoke.

It was colder, now it was getting dark. Moreland had built the fire up into a huge bonfire that snapped and spun sparks up into the night sky.

Paul took the stick they had drawn the world with and drove it deep in the heart of the fire to light it, then made patterns in the darkening air with the burning brand, red shapes that hung for a moment in their vision.

"I do not care about religion, or anything that is not G.o.d," he said. Then he looked guiltily at Clary-but perhaps psalms would not count as quoting. She smiled at him. She had soothed and quieted Pearce until he slept, as peaceful as a child sleeping in its mother's arms.

Mrs. Zenko, sweet and tidy on the wild night sh.o.r.e, wrapped the wings of her sweater around the children to keep them warm while the others began to pack up, leaving that place, ready for the short walk back to the cars.

Acknowledgements.

In case one of Paul's quotations is tickling at the edge of your mind, here are the poets, in order of appearance: Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Isaac Bashevis Singer (The Spinoza of Market Street), Emily d.i.c.kinson, Hebrews 13 ("entertaining angels unawares"), e. e. c.u.mmings, Stevie Smith at sad length, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rilke, Hopkins again (and not for the last time), Dylan Thomas rhapsodizing on beer and then on whiskey, Flann O'Brien (on the aftermath of beer and whiskey), William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, Shakespeare, St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, Thomas Hood, Alfred Noyes, Shakespeare again, W. B. Yeats ("so great a sweetness flows"), Pablo Neruda, Song of Solomon, Hopkins again, Matthew Arnold, Ted Hughes's cheerful little ditty called Lovesong, Hopkins (again), (and again), Thomas Merton, Hopkins one last time on the riverbank, and finally Psalm 131.

Dolly's books are The Children Who Lived in a Barn, by Eleanor Graham (now in a beautiful reissue from Persephone Books in England), Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White (pretty widely available, but there's a nice edition, with the original drawings by Fritz Eichenberg, one of the great ill.u.s.trators and printmakers of the twentieth century, from the New York Review Children's Collection), and a cheap old edition of Vanity Fair, with front pages missing and a red board cover that reddens your hands if you read it in the bathtub.

Clary only thinks in poetry once (and it is Philip Larkin, as was her first instinct, not Dylan Thomas). She remembers Pogo, the seminal 1950s comic strip by Walt Kelly, now available in reprinted collections. I've seen the charming Bug Play performed, but have been unable to locate the author or composer.

Thanks for financial support to the Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. For his generous and fearsome clarity, I am always indebted to Peter Ormshaw. Thanks to the brilliant Melanie Little for her manifold gifts as both editor and writer; to the good shepherdess, Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency; and to Jennifer Barth.

I thank Doctors Thyra Endicott, Nora Ku, and Jill Nation for help with cancer, and Azana Endicott, too late. I continue to rely on Sara O'Leary, Jeanne Harvie, Steve Gobby, and Glenda MacFarlane, who also knew Binnie.

Thanks to Rachel and Will Ormshaw, research and development. Thoughtful advice: Timothy Endicott, Jonathan Chute. Time alone: Sarah and Mark Wellings. Early training: my dear father, Orville Endicott. The parish described here bears no resemblance to any on earth, and no true bishop would ever wear suede shoes.

For their shining example, I am grateful to Bill and Violet Ormshaw. Thanks also, as always, to my lovely mother, Julianne Endicott.

About the Author.

MARINA ENDICOTT worked as an actor and director before moving to London, England, where she began to write fiction. She now makes her home in Alberta. Her second novel, Good to a Fault, was nominated for the Giller Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award for Canada and the Caribbean.

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