Filed To Story: Sunrise on the Reaping Book PDF Free
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”
Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore –
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; –
‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”
I go looking for her one night, searching for freshly overturned earth and a new headstone in the graveyard on the hill. The others are there – Ma, Sid, my fellow tributes – but not Lenore Dove.
The Covey’s crooked house stands dark and silent in the moonlight. I roam around the yard like a stray dog, curl up under her window, yearning for her ghost to find me. It must be three in the morning when the fiddle begins, soft and low, playing her song.
Does Clerk Carmine somehow know I’m there? Is this his attempt to drive me stark raving mad? I pound on the door, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Where is she? Where is she?”
The fiddle falls silent. But it’s too late. The earworm has awoken.
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door –
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door –
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore –
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
The sleep syrup runs out and in desperation I begin to visit old Bascom Pie, loading a sack with bottles of rotgut, clinking all the way home. Some nights I find the oblivion I seek, others I wander through the dark. One morning, as I awake half-naked on the green outside my house, covered in mosquito bites, I realize where she must be. That her uncles would not have laid her to rest in the District 12 graveyard but taken her somewhere she loved. That they all loved. The woods.
I am a man on a mission. For weeks, I wander through the trees, circle the lake, examine the soil under the apple trees, looking for any sign of her. Entreating the mockingjays for a clue to her whereabouts. Calling her name into the wind. The leaves turn scarlet and gold, crunching beneath my feet. “Lenore Dove! Lenore Dove!” I cry, but she doesn’t reveal herself.
Burdock comes, though, appearing out of the mist. His leather jacket fastened against the frost, his bow in hand, a brace of wild turkey at his hip. He has not forgiven me, will never, but is not beyond pity. Perhaps because he knows what it is to love. “If you want her, come on” is all he says. And I do want her, just as long ago I wanted the apples he promised, and so I follow him far, far into the woods. Beyond the lake, beyond my ken, to a hidden grove no normal human eye could detect. And here he leaves me.
A small, secret graveyard with beautifully carved headstones. Covey. Each marked only with a snippet of their name poems.
Among them, on a creamy white stone:
“Lady,” he said, – “Maude Clare,” he said, –
“Maude Clare”: – and hid his face.
On a mossy slab of slate:
– Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
And on a gray rock, speckled with pink and purple:
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