Strange to think that if he hadn’t been stricken with polio, he might never have met Jane Austen. “My favorite,” his mother said quietly, as if confessing a secret. “From before I met your father.” She hadn’t the time to read ittohim, she said—“The whole town will starve if I’m not there to sell them their milk and eggs!”—but she’d placed the book in his hands and given him a silent, serious nod. Percy understood. They were coconspirators now.
It had taken Percy a while to get used to the language, and some of the words were new, but he hadn’t anywhere else to be, and once he was inside there was no turning back.Pride and Prejudice,Sense and Sensibility,Emma; they’d seemed at first to describe a world quite unlike his own, but the more he read, the more he came to recognize the people of his town in Austen’s characters, the self-importance and ambitions, misunderstandings and missed opportunities, secrets and simmering resentments. He’d laughed with them, and wept quietly into his pillowcase when they suffered, and cheered them on when finally they saw the light. He had come to love them,he realized; somehow, he had come to care for them—figments of a faraway author’s imagination—with the same wholeheartedness he felt for his parents and his very best friends.
When he had exhausted the small stock of books his mother kept in her secret box in the shed, Percy convinced her to borrow new ones for him, three at a time, from the traveling library. He would read with his back to the door, ready to tuck the illicit novel away beneath the sheets at the sound of his father’s footsteps in the hall. His dad would come upstairs after work each night to stand by Percy’s bedside, a big man rendered helpless, frowning with impotent frustration as he asked whether Percy was feeling any better and silently willed his son’s useless legs to recover.
And perhaps all that willing worked, because Percy was one of the lucky ones. He wasn’t much good with a football anymore, and he was too slow on the cricket pitch, but with the help of a pair of splints, he slowly regained the use of his legs and, in the years to follow, an observer would’ve been hard-pressed to guess that the boy offering himself up as umpire was any less physically able than the other lads.
Percy didn’t give up his reading, but neither did he shout about it. Fiction, nonfiction, and, as he got older, and his changing feelings made him a stranger to himself, poetry, too. He devoured Emily Dickinson, marveled at Wordsworth, and found a friend in Keats. How was it, he wondered, that T. S. Eliot, a man born in America who’d made a life for himself in London—city of history, of Englishness; foreign to Percy, mysterious and gray-stoned—could look inside Percy’s own heart and see there so clearly his own considerations about time and memory and what it meant to be a person in the world.
These thoughts he kept to himself. It wasn’t that his secret was guilty; rather that he knew already that the other boys in Tambilla didn’t share his interest. Even Meg had looked at him uncertainly when, during their courtship, he’d ventured to ask after her favorite book. She’d hesitated before answering, “Why, the Bible, of course.”At the time, he’d taken the response for piety—which was unexpected, and a bit surprising given some of the other things they’d said to one another. Later, though, when they’d been married for a year or two, he’d brought it up again and she’d looked confused before dissolving into laughter. “I thought you were checking on my virtue,” she’d said. “I hadn’t wanted to disappoint you.”
Blaze was lathered with sweat, so Percy stopped at the trough in Hahndorf’s main street to let her have a drink and a rest. He climbed down from the saddle and looped the horse’s reins over a post.
It was after three, and the street was in shade, courtesy of the hundreds of giant chestnuts, elms, and plane trees running down each side, planted more than half a century before. Some of the businesses were still open, and Percy was drawn to the window of a nearby woodturner’s workshop, where a couple of shelves displayed an assortment of handmade items: bowls and utensils, some decorative carvings.
Percy went inside. “There’s a little wren,” he said to the girl behind the counter. The sound of his own voice was a surprise; it was the first time he’d spoken to anyone all day. “May I have a closer look?”
The girl went to take it down, bringing the miniature figure back to Percy.
Percy marveled as he turned it this way and that. He held it up to the light, admiring the fragile set of the bird’s neck, the jaunty sweep of its tail feathers. The likeness was remarkable, the workmanship fine.
“Is it a gift?” said the girl.
He placed the carving back on the counter with a nod. “She collects them.”
The shopgirl offered to wrap the wren. She had a little piece of Christmas paper and a length of fine silver ribbon in the back room where she’d been readying her own gifts, she said; it was as well to use the rest today. “Won’t be much call for it tomorrow, will there?”
After he had paid, Percy tucked the tiny wrapped present in his pocket and wished the girl a merry Christmas.
“To you, too, Mr. Summers,” she said. “And give my best to Mrs. Summers.” He must have looked surprised because she laughed. “We’re in the CWA together. Mrs. Summers is going to love that little wren. She told me once that she has a special fondness for birds, that she’s loved them ever since she was a child.”
Percy couldn’t recollect the first time he’d laid eyes on Meg. In truth, she’d always been around. For a long while, she was just one of several younger kids making up the gang of them that used to gather in the dusty paddocks or on the edge of the river after rain looking for what passed as sport. She’d been a dirty little thing, but he hadn’t judged her for that; they were all country kids who didn’t have much use for spit and polish, unless it was to front up to church on Sunday, and even then only under threat of a thrashing from their mothers.
But he’d come across her one day when he was out by the disused copper mine, not far from where the trains ran through from Balhannah to Mount Pleasant. He went there when he wanted to escape his father’s well-meaning attempts to “toughen him up.” She was sitting on the windowsill of the old stone crusher house, her face a hot mess of tears and snot and dirt. At the time, he’d wondered how on earth she’d got herself up there, a tiny scrap of a girl like that. It was only later, when he got to know her, that he realized the angelic face belied a tough-as-nails survivor’s spirit.
Percy had called out to ask her what was wrong, and at first she’d refused to tell him anything. He hadn’t pushed it; he’d simply got on with his business, reading for a time in the shade of the big circular chimney before giving his legs a stretch, then poking about in the overgrown spear grass, searching for flat stones to skim across the dam. He could feel her watching him, but he made no further overtures. It must have looked like fun, what he was doing, though,because without a word she appeared at his side and began searching for her own skimmers.
They continued in a companionable silence, broken only on occasion when he whistled his appreciation at a bouncer she’d tossed along the water’s surface. At lunchtime he split his sandwich with her. They ate without talking, but for the updates he gave when he spotted a bird of interest.
“Sacred kingfisher,” he said, pointing at the stout puffed-up chest in the lowest branch of a nearby she-oak.
“Is not. It’s a kookaburra.”
He shook his head. “Same family, but see how her darker feathers are turquoise? Just watch—she’ll dart out when a lizard or beetle catches her fancy, and you’ll see how they glisten in the sunlight.”
“What’s that one, then?”
“A red wattle.”
“And that one over there?”
Percy spotted the black-and-white bird with its bright yellow beak. “Noisy miner. Can’t you tell? She doesn’t stop calling.”
“What about that one?” The girl pointed up at a small bird with a vibrant blue breast and long, straight tail feathers that jutted skyward.
“That’s a blue wren—a superb blue wren, to be precise.”
“I like her best.”
