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So much guilt! Not that there wasn’t enough and to spare—and plainly enough, Arch felt his own. Did it not occur to any of them that Mrs. Bug had had something to do with this, herself? Had she not fired at Jamie
Gradually, he grew calmer, only because it was impossible to sustain such a level of fury.
“Have you ever met a German bandit?” I asked. With the exception of the occasional drunkard or wife-beater, almost all the Germans we knew were honest, hardworking, and virtuous to a fault. Not all that surprising, given that so many of them had come to the colony as part of a religious movement.
Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
“Catholics don’t believe in divorce,” Bree had informed him once. “We do believe in murder. There’s always Confession, after all.”
“If ever you find yourself in the midst of paradox, you can be sure you stand on the edge of truth,” his adoptive father had told him once. “You may not know what it is, mind,” he’d added with a smile. “But it’s there.”
“They’re girls,” she replied briefly. “They were born in danger and will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.”
“I think it is right and necessary, sir,” Abram replied stoutly. “The King is a tyrant, and tyranny must be resisted by all proper men.”
“We rely upon the goodness and mercy of God,” Denzell said firmly. “And if we are killed, then we die in the firm expectation of God’s life and resurrection.”
“I’ve heard it said that a man’s reach must exceed his grasp—or what’s a heaven for?”
It was possible to leave things behind—places, people, memories—at least for a time. But places held tight to the things that had happened in them, and to come again to a place you had once lived was to be brought face-to-face with what you had done there and who you had been.
“To the best of my knowledge, you needed me urgently the moment I saw you. And I haven’t had reason to think you’ve got any more self-sufficient since.
All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death the key to the gate that bars memory.
“He’s just here,” he said to Jenny, nodding to the spot between them. “Where he belongs.”
You didn’t hear about old women as spies—but then again, that might merely indicate how good they were at it.
Like forgiveness, it was not a thing once learned and then comfortably put aside but a matter of constant practice—to accept the notion of one’s own mortality, and yet live fully, was a paradox worthy of Socrates.
Much better to die than be left to mourn.
