Cutler 05 - Darkest Hour

many of them portraits of Booth ancestors: dark-faced men with pinched noses and thin lips, yet many with copper-brown beards and mustaches, just like Papa's.
    Some of the women were lean with faces as hard as the men, many looking down with an expression of chastisement or indignation, as if what I was doing or what I had said, or even what I had thought, was improper in their puritanical eyes. I saw resemblances to Emily everywhere, yet in none of the ancient faces did I find the smallest resemblance to my own.
    Eugenia looked different too, but Louella thought that was because she had been a sickly baby and had developed a disease I couldn't pronounce until I was nearly eight. I think I was afraid to say it, afraid to utter the words for fear the sound could somehow spread a contagion. It made my heart thump to hear anyone say it, especially Emily, who, according to Mother, was able to pronounce it perfectly the first time she had heard it: cystic fibrosis.
    But Emily was always very different from me. None of the things that excited me excited her. She never played with dolls or cared about pretty dresses. It was a pain for her to brush her hair and she didn't mind that it hung listlessly over her eyes and down her cheeks like worn hemp, the dark brown strands always looking dirty and drab. It didn't excite her to go running through a field chasing after a rabbit, or go wading in the pond on hot summer days. She took no special pleasure in the blooming of roses or the burst of wild violets. With an arrogance that grew as she sprouted taller and taller, Emily took everything beautiful for granted.
    Once, when Emily was barely twelve, she took me aside and squeezed her eyes into tiny slits the way she always did when she wanted to say something important. She told me I was to treat her special because she had seen God's finger come out of the sky that very morning and touch The Meadows: a reward for Papa's and her religious devotion.
    Mother used to say that she believed Emily was already twenty years old the day she was born. She swore on a stack of Bibles that it took ten months to give birth to her, and Louella agreed that "a baby cookin' that long would be different."
    For as long as I could remember, Emily was bossy. What she did like to do was follow after the chambermaids and complain about their work. She loved to come running with her forefinger up, the tip smeared with dust and grime, to tell Mother or Louella that the maids didn't do a good enough job. When she was ten, she didn't even bother to go to Mamma or Louella; she bawled out the maids herself and sent them scurrying back to redo the library or the sitting room, or Papa's office. She especially liked to please Papa, and always bragged about the way she had gotten the maid to shine up his furniture or pull out each and every one of the volumes of books on his dark oak shelves and dust each jacket.
    Even though Papa claimed he had no time to read anything but the Bible, he had a wonderful collection of old books, most first editions bound in leather, their untouched and unread pages slightly yellow on the edges. When Papa was away on one of his business trips and no one was watching, I would sneak into his office and pull out the volumes. I'd pile them beside me on the floor and carefully open the covers. Many had fine ink illustrations, but I just turned the pages and pretended I could read and understand the words. I couldn't wait until I was old enough to go to school to learn to read.
    Our school was just outside of Upland Station. It was a small, gray clapboard building with three stone steps and a cow bell that Miss Walker used to call in the children when lunch was over or recess ended. I never knew Miss Walker to be anything but old, even when I was little and she was probably no more than thirty. But she kept her dull black hair in a severe bun and she always wore glasses as thick as goggles.
    When Emily first went to school, she would return each day with horrifying stories about how hard Miss Walker would beat the hands of ruffian boys like Samuel Turner or Jimmy Wilson. Even when she was only seven years of age, Emily was proud of the fact that Miss Walker relied on her to tell on the other children if they misbehaved in any way. "I'm the eyes behind Miss Walker's head," she declared haughtily. "All I have to do is point to someone and Miss Walker will sit him in the corner with a dunce's cap smack over his head. And she does that to