Candace Lark Character Analysis

So Theophilus poked around the shack and brooded over the pile of sleeping children like a mother robin, wearing the dress and shopkeeper’s apron, and whenever any islander passed by he paused at his aimless chores or rose from the chair outside the door and came to the edge of the dirt yard and wrung his hands in an old red rag he took from the apron’s front pocket, nodded at the passerby and said, What lack ye, Mr. Diamond? What lack ye, Eha Honey? To the children he asked, What lack ye, my little salted cods? What lack ye, my little oysters?

Candace Lark never liked housekeeping and was no good at it anyway. A particular squalor surrounded the Larks’ shack when she had been in charge of domestic order. Much of that had been due to the children, who arrived one after another for eight years, counting the five that didn’t live. But even considering mothering and scant means and the necessity of staying home while Theophilus fished, Candace lacked instinct for tending her kids and shack.

Zachary worked by the light of a candle. As the carvings rose higher up the tree, he made them narrower and more convoluted in order to draw out the composition of each figure and scene so he would not run out of space before he ran out of mortal time, so that he would not complete a work at which he felt more and more he should finish his days laboring, dying as he etched the most elegant possible toes for a barefoot mother weeping for her child.

Candace grabbed blindly in the surf and caught the man who had punched her around the waist, as much to raise herself up as to stop the man from punching her again, but the man took it to mean that she was fighting back so he boxed her on the ears and punched her on the side of the head again, near her brow, and split the skin open over one of her eyes.

So Theophilus poked around the shack and brooded over the pile of sleeping children like a mother robin, wearing the dress and shopkeeper’s apron, and whenever any islander passed by he paused at his aimless chores or rose from the chair outside the door and came to the edge of the dirt yard and wrung his hands in an old red rag he took from the apron’s front pocket, nodded at the passerby and said, What lack ye, Mr. Diamond? What lack ye, Eha Honey? To the children he asked, What lack ye, my little salted cods? What lack ye, my little oysters?

Candace Lark never liked housekeeping and was no good at it anyway. A particular squalor surrounded the Larks’ shack when she had been in charge of domestic order. Much of that had been due to the children, who arrived one after another for eight years, counting the five that didn’t live. But even considering mothering and scant means and the necessity of staying home while Theophilus fished, Candace lacked instinct for tending her kids and shack.

Zachary worked by the light of a candle. As the carvings rose higher up the tree, he made them narrower and more convoluted in order to draw out the composition of each figure and scene so he would not run out of space before he ran out of mortal time, so that he would not complete a work at which he felt more and more he should finish his days laboring, dying as he etched the most elegant possible toes for a barefoot mother weeping for her child.

Candace grabbed blindly in the surf and caught the man who had punched her around the waist, as much to raise herself up as to stop the man from punching her again, but the man took it to mean that she was fighting back so he boxed her on the ears and punched her on the side of the head again, near her brow, and split the skin open over one of her eyes.