Read Celia's Song for Free Online Page B

flatly. Relieved, they relax and resume eating.
    The foreman signals lunch break is over. Steve strolls up the hill to choke off another tree. At the top, he glances back at Joey. It dawns on him: there was no sea serpent on the house front. He shudders.
    Steve knows something.
    SCREAMS COME AT CELIA again through the veil of sleep. They are soft, but insist upon being heard. She awakes, swings her legs off the bed, heads toward her bedroom window. The voices retreat as she approaches the windowsill. She peers outside at the poplars, which now hang limp, waiting for something to happen. Through the leaves, the same shape she had witnessed the night before twists itself up into a ball, unravels, stands up, and then thumps as it hits the ground. She is not sure what it is at first when, for the briefest moment, it stops and slithers back and forth. Then it looks as though it is trying to move but can’t, as though something has a hold on it from the inside. Celia bobs side to side, like an old bear trying to get a better look.
    No stars backlight the trees and it is too early for the sun. The dark is thick, too dense for her to see through. Behind the shape’s movements, as though quarrelling with something within, Celia sees Steve’s outline. Her breath catches and she moves her head back and forth. It doesn’t help. Finally, the strain of peering into the dark becomes too much. She pulls the curtains closed and climbs back into bed.
    Arms folded behind her head, Celia talks to herself. “I am thirtyeight and don’t have a lover, a husband, or even prospects. I see things going bump in the night and have no one to comfort me or explain them away.” She rolls over and returns to sleep.
    I don’t get Celia sometimes, but I am not alone. Her people don’t get her either.
    Much later in the morning, as she scrambles together some eggs and fried sausages, Celia dismisses the experience as a bad dream, even as she wonders why Steve was in it. He is white — Stacey’s former schoolmate and now Stacey’s secret lover. She laughs as she stirs the eggs and flips the sausages. There are too many sausages, but she is past the point of minding how much she eats.
    â€œGuess he’s not too big a secret, since I know about him.” Stacey believes no one knows about him. Maybe that’s the secret: Stacey doesn’t know we all know about him. On the other hand, maybe she knows we know and are all pretending not to know, and she is pretending she doesn’t while we actually don’t know she knows. Celia stuffs the scrambled eggs and sausages into the oven and sets it at one-hundred-fifty degrees to keep warm while she mixes up a batch of pancakes. She flaps the last jack, wipes her hands on her apron, and serves herself a plate of eggs, sausages, and pancakes. For a brief moment, she stares at the plate of food and thinks it an awful lot considering she isn’t all that active or hard-working. “Hell with it, I like eating,” she says, and ignores the little voice cautioning her.
    Her kitchen faces the right edge of her property on the road to town. The river saunters next to her house on the left side, after weaving back toward the reserve from the bridge. The bridge is not far from her house. Her old gramma chose this spot to build her house so that she could see the comings and goings of all the villagers. Like her gramma, Celia knows who’s visiting who, who’s keeping company with who, all based on who’s riding with who in whose car. This amuses her: she’s part of the reason people in small towns feel like they live in a fishbowl. Tony from the other end of the reserve passes by in his old car and the noisiness of it is comic. The river looks a little jerky today, like it isn’t all that happy. The fork stills in her hand, she licks it, plunges it into a sausage, then a piece of flapjack, rolls it in syrup, sticks the sticky mess in her