Tributaries: an excerpt from the novel
by Casey Cep

Norben was going through her things the way you would when someone has died. Lifting the lid of each of the boxes, he sorted through layers of paper, unfolding ribbons and banners, quickly reading newspaper clippings. A deck of cards had scattered into the corners of one box, while an envelope of bicentennial confetti spilled reds and whites and blues in another. He touched everything, putting some things to the side, but turning most of them in his hands, trying to remember what he could of them: mimeographed report cards became whole schoolrooms; programs and bulletins opened into pageants and plays; each of the articles grew into some season, summer or winter or spring or autumn.

He lost the morning moving between the attic and the other rooms, starting to sort through some of the boxes his mother had stored in the attic, but then going down into the other bedrooms when he could not continue. He lost himself in the arrangement of her house: the open and unadorned living room on the first floor; the bedroom off the hall where she had moved when she could no longer climb the stairs. He walked through the rooms in the same order that a stranger would have, revealing his deep knowledge of the house only when he lingered in the rooms where he had lived as a child. They had shared rooms even when there were so many, suffered the selfish arrangement because their mother had asked them to. He wondered only now why his mother had made the boys share that one bedroom when there were so many other rooms in their house.

The boxes were only in the attic of his mother's house, but she was still everywhere in it-as if her physical absence had no relevance. When Norben came into his mother's house that morning, he left his coat by the door and looked into every room of her house before starting to sort through her things. Embarrassed on her behalf, he thought of death's unnaturalness when he looked at her things all unattended and untidy: blood pressure and heart pills by the bedside, reading glasses on the table beside her chair, soiled clothes in small piles around the washing machine.

Now he thought of the boxes stacked high around him. As wide as they were deep, their tops were creased and folded but never sealed. Used once by the grocery stores and shipping companies who had them manufactured, the boxes coated in paraffin were taken then by someone else, someone like his mother. She had taken the boxes for their produce.

He remembered the way his boyish fingers grated against the sides of the boxes, thick wax crawling under his nails as they loaded all of the vegetables and ripened fruits into these boxes. He remembered how when their weight became too much, he would pause to rest them on the tops of his knees, think of clams burrowing in bottom land or crabs diving beneath the surface of the water, and then walk awkwardly towards the truck. And when they stopped planting vegetable gardens and harvesting the fruit from their trees, she had stopped buying boxes and started using them to store their belongings and keepsakes.

In front of Norben now were the three piles of things he had chosen for his brothers and sister, small piles for the living, while downstairs were the piles of his mother's things that none of them would want. These things were all that was left of her life and he considered them carefully, selecting only those things which would please his siblings, discarding anything that might remind them of the sadness of their young lives. He looked up at the ceiling that was just above his head and closed his eyes.

tributaries is dedicated to casey n. cep's mother and father, who raised her to love the land, and to jay, who taught her to love the sea.

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