Various Miracles by Carol Shields Page B

or a particle of gravel, formed in his throat.
    It stayed stubbornly lodged there all night. He found it painful to breath, and even Isobel noticed how he thrashed about in bed, gasping wildly for air. In the morning she called a doctor, who could find nothing wrong, but she remained uneasy, and that evening she stayed home and made him cups of iced honey-and-lemon tea to ease his throat. Hetook her hand at one point and held it to his lips as though it might be possible to find the air he needed inside the crevices of her skin. By now the scraping in his throat had become terrible, a raw agonizing rasp like a dull knife sawing through limestone. She looked at his face from which the healthy, blood-filled elasticity had gone out and felt herself brushed by a current of air or what might have been the memory of a name.
    He began to choke violently, and she heard something grotesque come out of his mouth, a sound that was only half-human, but which rode on a curious rhythmic wave that for some reason stirred her deeply. She imagined it to be the word
Isobel
. “Isobel?” she asked, trying to remember its meaning. He said it a second time, and this time the syllables were more clearly formed.
    The light of terror came into his eyes, or perhaps the beginning of a new fever; she managed to calm him by stroking his arm. Then she called the children inside the house, locked the doors and windows against the unbearable heat, and they began, slowly, patiently, hands linked, at the beginning where they had begun before—with table, chair, bed, cool, else, other, sleep, face, mouth, breath, tongue.

Poaching

    ON OUR WAY to catch the Portsmouth ferry, Dobey and I stayed overnight at a country hotel in the village of Kingsclere. The floors sloped, the walls tipped, the tap leaked rusty water and the bedclothes gave out an old, bitter odor.
    At breakfast we were told by the innkeeper that King John had once stayed in this hotel and, moreover, had slept in the very room where we had spent the night.
    “Wasn’t he the Magna Carta king?” Dobey said, showing off. “That would make it early thirteenth century.”
    “Incredible,” I said, worrying whether I should conceal my fried bread beneath the underdone bacon or the bacon beneath the bread. “Extraordinary.”
    The innkeeper had more to tell us. “And when His Royal Highness stopped here he was bit by a bedbug. Of course there’s none of that nowadays.” Here he chuckled a hearty chuckle and sucked in his red cheeks.
    I crushed my napkin—Dobey would call it a serviette—on top of my bacon and fried bread and egg yolk and said to myself: next he’ll be rattling on about a ghost.
    “And I didn’t like to tell you people last night when you arrived,” the innkeeper continued, “but the room where the two of you was—it’s haunted.”
    “King John? “I asked.
    “One of the guards, it’s thought. My wife’s seen ‘im many the time. And our Barbara. And I’ve heard ‘im clomping about in his great boots in the dark of the night and making a right awful noise.”
    Dobey and I went back to our room to brush our teeth and close our haversacks, and then we lay flat on our backs for a minute on the musty bed and stared at the crooked beams.
    “Are you thinking kingly thoughts?” I said after a while.
    “I’m thinking about those poor bloody Aussies,” said Dobey.
    “Oh, them,” I said. “They’ll make out all right.”
    Only the day before we’d picked up the two Australians on the road. Not that they were by any stretch your average hitchhikers—two women, a mother, middle-aged, and a grown daughter, both smartly dressed. Their rented Morris Minor had started to smoke between Farrington and Kingsclere, and we gave them a lift into the village.
    They’d looked us over carefully, especially the mother, before climbing into the backseat. We try to keep the backseat clean and free of luggage for our hitchhikers. The trick is to put them at their ease so