Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

Listening, not speaking, has been my way. I have become most proficient in it. My mother taught me the use of silence.

when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.

It was many weeks before he would even give me his name, that being considered a grave intimacy among his people. And when he did finally confide it to me, I understood why it is that they feel so. For with his name came an idea of who he truly was. And with that knowledge came the venom of temptation that would inflame my blood.

It was good, the

voice whispered. It was right and well to know these powers, to live in a world aswirl with spirits, everywhere ablaze with divinity.

She believed that each humble thing, if done worthily, might be touched by grace.

I have come to think it is a fault in us, to credit what we give in such a case, and never to consider what must be given up in order to receive it.

It had crossed my mind, as I stood to speak my confession, what a remarkable thing it was that the rare time a woman’s voice might be heard in our church was when she was execrating herself.

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

I do not choose to fear what I cannot know.