Morgan’s Falls

Morgan’s Falls is a picnic ground beside a waterfall, remembered first through Josie’s photographs and later through Klara’s visit with the Mother. Its significance extends well beyond the outing itself: the promise of a return depends on Josie’s recovery, but when the family eventually goes, Josie is absent. The contrast between the place’s remembered sunlight and beauty and the illness, separation, and uncertainty surrounding the visit makes Morgan’s Falls one of the settings through which Klara interprets what can—and cannot—be done for Josie.

Promise and remembered place

When Josie is unwell, the Mother offers a conditional plan: if Josie gets better by the weekend, they will go to Morgan’s Falls, a place Josie still loves. Josie agrees that she does, making the outing a small promise of pleasure held against the immediate uncertainty of her health.

As the evening approaches, Josie brings out a cardboard box of photographs kept under her bed. The prints spill across the rug, showing moments from her childhood with the Mother, Melania Housekeeper, and other people. Among them is a photograph of Morgan’s Falls, which Josie identifies as the destination for Sunday. In the picture, a younger Josie sits at a rough-plank table with the Mother, who looks less thin and wears her hair shorter. A third girl, about eleven years old, sits with her back to the photographer, her face hidden. The Sun’s patterns fall across the table, while a blurred black-and-white shape behind the family marks the waterfall. The photograph makes the promised visit part of a longer personal history: the place belongs to Josie’s remembered childhood as well as to the immediate plan for her recovery.

The visit without Josie

When Klara reaches the falls with the Mother, the setting is more expansive and populated than the photograph can convey. Fourteen rough wooden picnic tables stand around the field, each with plank benches. Adults, children, artificial friends, and dogs sit, walk, run, or stand among them. Beyond the tables, the waterfall is larger and fiercer than the one Klara saw in a magazine; in her visual way of apprehending the scene, it fills eight boxes by itself. The sky is gray, and she cannot see the Sun.

The Mother leaves Klara at a table while she goes to a wooden hut with an open counter, where visitors are queuing for coffee. The details of the public picnic ground—tables, benches, waterfall, and food hut—place the family’s private worry within a busy landscape shared by strangers and animals. Yet Josie, for whom the outing had been promised, is not there. The Mother later explains that it was right not to bring her because she was unwell, while admitting that she misses her. At the falls, the outing’s apparent fulfillment thus carries its absence with it: the family has arrived at the place Josie loves, but the person who gives the visit its meaning has had to stay behind.

The Mother’s request

The Mother’s response to Josie’s absence transforms the outing into an intimate test of Klara’s role in the family. Looking toward the waterfall and then at the people, dogs, and artificial friends around them, she asks Klara to be Josie for a little while. She reminds Klara that she had done this once before, on the day the family chose her at the store. Klara does not understand the request at first, but the Mother’s appeal joins the falls to the question of whether Klara can stand in for Josie—not merely accompany her.

That request is distinct from simply remembering Josie fondly. The Mother explicitly connects it to Klara’s earlier ability to act as Josie, and the setting makes the substitution immediate: the absent daughter’s mother is beside Klara at a place associated with Josie’s childhood. The visit therefore becomes a moment of strain between presence and replacement. The Mother misses her sick child, while Klara is asked to occupy Josie’s place temporarily; the passage establishes the emotional circumstances behind later efforts to imagine a future in which Klara might continue Josie.

The falls in Klara’s later memories

After the visit, Morgan’s Falls remains entangled with Klara’s thoughts about Josie’s condition. In the days afterward, Klara gathers pictures from Josie’s visual play and puts them away rather than speaking as she might have done earlier. The mood between them has changed, and Klara’s restraint makes the aftermath of the outing visible in their altered communication. When Rick does not return over the next two days, Josie says nothing about his absence when Melania Housekeeper asks where he has gone. The visit sits within a period when Josie is ill and relationships around her are becoming difficult to address openly.

Later, as Klara crosses the fields toward Mr McBain’s barn, an image of Rosa in pain flashes through her mind amid the oppressive, fearful landscape. The sound of an animal in distress recalls the bull Klara encountered on the way to Morgan’s Falls. For a moment, she wonders whether the Sun is not kind and whether the bull might explain Josie’s worsening condition. When she reaches the barn, the memory returns: she recalls the Mother scrutinizing her across the picnic bench and the bull’s angry stare. She fears that by intruding she may have angered the Sun, who might be unable to distinguish Josie from humans who have angered him through pollution and inconsideration. Morgan’s Falls is thus not simply a scene of natural beauty in Klara’s memory; its threatening bull becomes bound to her guilt and uncertainty about the Sun’s power to help.

Landscape, appeal, and composite memory

During a later appeal to the Sun at the barn, Klara again remembers the bull on the path to Morgan’s Falls, this time as an image of a creature whose anger seems to have been allowed to remain unchecked in sunny grass. The recollection appears alongside other scenes and people as Klara tries to ask the Sun to give Josie special nourishment. Her thoughts return to the Sun’s past kindness to Beggar Man and his dog, and to the possibility that the Sun might again help someone in need. Morgan’s Falls contributes both a warning and a remembered image of sunlight: the bull recalls an apparent error and danger, while the four sheep Klara saw from the Mother’s car on the return journey had made her happy and helped erase the bull from her mind. The place holds these opposing impressions together rather than resolving them.

From her later position at the Yard, Klara describes memories that merge Morgan’s Falls with the dark-sky morning when the Sun saved Josie and with the illuminated diner Mr Vance chose. In the composite scene, the Mother stands with her back to Klara, watching mist from the waterfall, while Klara seems to be in her diner booth and can hear Mr Vance’s unkind words. Dark clouds gather above the falls, carrying small cylinders and pyramids in the wind. Klara insists she can still distinguish the separate memories and restore each to its proper context; she recognizes the rough borders of the combined image and the clouds’ incorrect scale. Yet the merged scene can feel so vivid that she forgets for a time that she is sitting on the hard ground at the Yard. Morgan’s Falls endures, then, not only as a remembered destination but as one component in Klara’s changing inner landscape, where the family’s fear, the Sun’s possible intervention, and her own later isolation overlap without becoming identical.