Every Last Cuckoo (31 page)

Mordechai placed a menorah on the mantel in the great room during Christmas week. “Hanukkah is only a minor holiday,” he said. “But it comes near the solstice, when the light begins to return. It feels good to mark that with a new candle each day.”

Sarah was the only one who knew that Mordechai was staying for good once his book was finished. He had given her the news just after she told him the whole story of her encounter with Roger. He said it was time for him to live among family and friends, time to settle where peace might not be perfect, or dangers lacking, but where life went largely unimpeded.

“I am not leaving the struggle,” he had said, “only moving it. To write and teach here, in this country that has such power, such potential. And it has you, Sarah.” Silencing her protest, he added, “You who do what every person must, if we are ever to have peace.”

On Christmas Eve, everyone gathered at Sarah's. On this night, no one wanted to be anywhere else. Peter and Vivi came, accompanied by Jonathan and Molly, who walked with a cane, scowling at the inconvenience of it. Together they totaled twenty-four—eleven cuckoos, thirteen warblers. Birds of a feather, nonetheless.

When the evening was over and warm bodies lay strewn about on beds and cots and couches, in the house and the cabin
and over the barn, Sarah took up her spot at the window seat. She wrapped herself up in her quilt, opened the casement to the earth and sky, and breathed deeply, steadily, inhaling the cold and the smell of cold, envisioning the light from the stars entering her lungs. In and out she breathed, dropping further toward her center with every exhalation. Images came and went. Charles, tall and fond; her son Andrew, still as a stone behind his eyelids. All her offspring, and theirs; all her forebears, and theirs. Moose, coyotes, fishers, and blue jays; her photographs, the pretty and the ugly, the leavings of animals and evidence of slaughter. Charles would have been astonished by her photographs.

Sarah was unafraid, and strange in her own eyes. She was a tramp in the woods, a sharp eye through a lens. She could see the elements inside out, dust in mud, drought in rain. She could see the sky and earth gone topsy-turvy, could see gravity in the image of a snowflake, falling or rising, obeying or defying the laws of nature. Again and again, she heard Charles's final words to her, and she still did not know what they meant. What she believed, however, what she took on faith, was that he had seen a light and had decided to follow it.

Sarah's grief, which now felt like Charles himself hovering just out of sight, had taught her that love always brings loss. Nevertheless, love was where she would put her energies, because that was where her powers lay. There wasn't a thing she could do about loss.

W
ORK ON THIS
novel was supported in part by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council in connection with the National Endowment for the Arts.

Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 2008 by Kate Maloy. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-946-7

Praise for
Every Last Cuckoo

“A story about the profound gifts of time, love, and loss . . . Maloy's message is about affirming the profundity of grief by expressing that energy in positive ways. This story is her generous vision of how things could be.”

—The Olympian

“The appeal of Maloy's debut—which has the fast-forward quality of a fairy tale—is not in its subtlety but in its conviction.”

—People

“Maloy does a marvelous job depicting the kind of tender, steady domestic partnership that is the reward of a lifetime of shared experiences, both good and bad . . . Its tenderly wrought portrayal of elderly life has an unexpectedly powerful effect, revealing fictional possibilities we'd either forgotten about or never considered at all.”

—The Oregonian

“Maloy nicely portrays the long, imperfect, but still lusty marriage of Sarah and husband Charles, moves gracefully through the shock of loss, and charts the steps back into community. But what feels most original and moving is Maloy's sense of how Sarah sees herself connected to other generations.”

—The Boston Sunday Globe

“This lovely tale depicts the surprises and changes that come about with aging . . . Maloy has created a truly engrossing novel, with situations at times both joyful and horribly sad and an entirely likable protagonist surrounded by an eclectic cast of friends and family. An excellent book club selection; highly recommended.”

—Library Journal

“A luminously textured novel that insists that grief need not diminish a life but instead can offer up a bounty of surprises, that choices don't have to narrow as we age but, in fact, can grow more plentiful, and, finally and most important, that love can be as open and expansive as the sky itself. I loved this rich and haunting novel.”

—Caroline Leavitt, author of
Girls in Trouble
and
Coming Back to Me

“A beautiful, graceful story about a vibrant, beautiful woman.”

—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“A wonderful story of human potential and what is possible when strangers become family . . . This heartwarming tale is an excellent read.”

—The Roanoke Times

“[A] moving debut.”

—More

“A tender and wise story of what happens when love lasts. This vivid and original novel seizes and surprises the reader, who is rewarded by an extraordinarily appealing range of the best sort of fully engaging novel elements, from the moving issues of multi-generational family dynamics and aging and solitude to the necessity of confronting our own sometimes violent instincts as creatures living in the natural world. It's a stunning, elegant debut.”

—Katharine Weber, author of
Triangle
and
The Little Women

“
Every Last Cuckoo
is an impressive step in a new literary direction.”

—MSNBC.com

“Kate Maloy's sweetly inspiring first novel,
Every Last Cuckoo,
is a lovely meditation on what miracles can happen when we simply open our hearts . . . Maloy's novel grabs the reader by the heart—it is rare indeed to find such assured fiction about love that endures over time . . . In this portrait of a long and loving marriage, Maloy gives us a real human family, with all its love and conflict and change, as well as a look at the richness that can come with age.”

—The New Orleans Times-Picayune

“A striking portrait of a marriage that is as imperfect and amiable as its participants.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“This charming novel is an examination of friendship, tragedy, romance, generosity, moral indignation, aging, solitude, and what happens when love lasts and we confront our own inner weathers.”

—Rocky Mount Telegram

“This is a splendid book, written in spare, clean prose, in which the knots of grief and complication are eased to resolution by wisdom and love.”

—Peter Pouncey, author of
Rules for Old Men Waiting

“[A] moving debut novel . . . Maloy's wordplay and startling nature imagery enchant.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Almost every page rewards the reader in some unexpected way: by a glimpse of the Vermont landscape, a moment of intimacy between the characters, a beautifully turned sentence. And every page brings us closer to Sarah, Kate Maloy's remarkable heroine, a woman so passionate, so intelligent and so full of life that most readers will quickly forget that she happens to be in her seventies. This is a wonderful debut.”

—Margot Livesey, author of
Banishing Verona
and
Eva Moves the Furniture

“What great pleasure Kate Maloy gives us with this lovely, lucid novel of family, landscape, and complications.”

—Roxana Robinson, author of
Sweetwater
and
This Is My Daughter

Also by Kate Maloy
A Stone Bridge North: Reflections in a New Life