Places in the Dark by Thomas H. Cook

printing press. Dr. Putnam had been injured in a hunting accident two days before, however, so it was my mother who treated my father’s wounded hand. “There were younger men, of course,” she’d tell Billy, “but I preferred the bread to the yeast.” They were married eight months later, lived together for the next twenty-five years.
    I’d been at work in the district attorney’s office for four years when she left my father in order to “be with her thoughts,” as she put it.
    She’d chosen to live in a tiny cottage on Fox Creek, only a stone’s throw from the old bridge that spanned it, and from which I’d watched my brother guide his raft across the water. She’d furnished the cottage sparsely. A bed, a few chairs, books, almost nothing else. She wanted to “pare things down,” she said, the only explanation she ever gave. But the little cottage, spare as it seemed, was always flooded with light and music, the quick step of my mother’s feet when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, some bit of verse struck her and she rushed to her books, searching for the reference.
    In the years before her stroke I’d visited her often atFox Creek, usually in company with Billy. On occasion we’d find her inside the cabin, humming as she swept the floor or washed the dishes. At other times she’d be sitting along the bank of Fox Creek, an old cane fishing pole stuck in the ground beside her, her eyes fixed on the little red bob that floated idly in the stream, a book of poetry always in her lap.
    My brother worshiped her, of course, referred to her teasingly as “The Great Example,” as in, “The Great Example came by the paper this morning.” Or “I had a talk with The Great Example last night.” He adored her for her joy and energy, the way her laughter rang like bells, but more than anything for the one great lesson he said she’d taught him, that you’re alive only when you feel you’re alive, all else “a breathing death.”
    We’d last been together at Fox Creek on a bright day in early summer. Billy brought a blanket for Mother and spread it on the ground beside the creek. After picking a cluster of mountain laurel, she lowered herself gracefully onto the blanket and sat Indian-style, her back propped against a tree. She had been living at Fox Creek for four years by then, and during that time her hair had turned completely white, though her skin remained remarkably smooth, with only a few telltale wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She seemed to know that something was coming for her, something she could only wait for, see like a dark horse in the distance. Her own mother had died at forty-three, her father at forty-six, both, she said, of poor hearts. Even so, she wanted to continue as The Great Example. And so she worked at being cheerful, discussed her gardening with me, bantered merrily with Billy. But after a time, her mood seemed to alter. She looked out over the creek, the lush green meadows beyond it. “How perfect it all is,” she murmured.
    “You’ve never regretted it?” I asked. “Leaving Dad? Moving here? Living alone? No doubts that…”
    Billy touched her hand. “Mother has never doubted anything,” he said.
    She looked at me as if I’d challenged her. “Not anything basic, Cal,” she said.
    I could see how certain she remained, how convinced of her wisdom, assured that she’d never deluded herself nor misled anyone, that by following her heart she had arrived at the small paradise she now occupied along the banks of Fox Creek.
    The stroke came three days later.
    I found her. Lying faceup beside her bed, her eyes open, staring, her mouth pulled down on the left side, fixing her face in a terrible scowl. She’d soiled herself, and a dull yellow stain spread across her nightdress. That she had lain for many hours in such indignity sent a fire through my brain.
    “She shouldn’t have been out there by herself,” I told Billy as we paced the hospital