The Secret Feather

THE SECRET FEATHER /Robb Forman Dew Robb Forman Dew's upcoming novel The Time ofHer life is about a small family—a mother, father, and daughter—who despite their love for each other, has fallen into a pattern ofdestruction. Claudia, the mother, is sensitive andloving, yet unable to find order in her life. She has been married to Avery, who is now an academic at a State University, since they were both very young, and their dependency on each other in some ways has become even more passionate and desperate than when they were youngsters living on the same block in a small town in Mississippi. "The Secret Feather, " the novel's third chapter, is told through the perspective of their daughter, Jane, as she visits her friend, Diana Tunbridge. The Tunbridges, especially the mother, Maggie, a professional with a mighty sense of what is orderly and right, represent everything that her own parents are not. ON THAT SATURDAY afternoon before the ice and while the exterminator was still roaming around her house, Jane phoned Diana Tunbridge to tell her that she was coming over, after all. They arranged to meet halfway across the meadow so that they could walk back together to Diana's where Jane would spend the night. By the time she had collected her things and packed her backpack she was overtaken once again by that familiar dolefulness that assailed her whenever she deserted her mother and father. It worried her to leave them to their own devices even when she was angry at them. They were still sitting quietly in the living room when she came downstairs, and she stopped in the doorway to say goodbye, but both Avery and Claudia were abstracted, and her mother was a little irritable. "All right, then, Janie. You are going?" Claudia raised her hand in a listless dismissal. "We'll see you tomorrow. Have a nice time." This was not a wish for Jane, or encouragment. It was what her mother said by rote while her mind was working on something else entirely, and, as always when Jane stepped outside her doorway she was swept through and through with a peculiar kind of loneliness. She suffered a paring away and sparseness at the very core of herself that left her unhappily disburdened. She set out through the meadow, and as she wound down the path through the grass she saw Diana already waiting under the cluster of trees where they always met. Without considering it Jane slowed her approach to allow some substance of the day to fill her a little. Besides, this was not just any piece of land between two houses; she had The Missouri Review · 167 invented this terrain at age eight when her parents had bought four acres from the Tunbridge's and built their house. The steep path between her house and the Tunbridge's was of her own making, and it wound narrowly through the high grass. Diana was sitting beneath the Four Trees—four great pin oaks that formed a hollow square. Summer before last she and Diana had buried a cache of candles and matches and a flashlight there in two layers of Zip-Loc bags and a larger plastic bag enclosing those and fastened with a twist-tie. They had marked the turnoff to the Troubled Rocks with a handful of assorted stones that they had arranged to look as if those various pebbles had merely rolled into place there along the main path. Only one or the other of the girls could detect that separate trail so subtly marked through the head-high weeds, and they could find their way along it to a large boulder and some other good sized rocks that lay in an inexplicable clearing. Jane had gone there alone, now and then, willing herself to sit among those stones even when the low moving clouds threw her into deep shadow beyond which she could see the sunshine. At a moment like that she would press herself flat back against the boulder under the terrifying weight of that dark beam, but sometimes such an abrupt and selective darkening of the day opened out before her...