Bulls Island Read Online Free

dismissal.
    I walked Valerie to the door, listened as she climbed the stairs and finally clicked the door of our bedroom closed. My spirits sank. Our marriage was cruising in rocky water. When I turned back to the table I saw that Mother had risen from her place and assumed Valerie’s chair, which struck me as slightly Freudian, but then I thought perhaps she wanted to be closer to the doors for the stingy air. The room seemed more stifling than ever.
    “I feel sorry for her,” I said, plopping back in my chair and picking up a quail from the platter with my fingers. I dropped it onto my plate and gave a moment’s consideration to eating it with a fork and knife or dismembering it with my bare hands.
    “Well, who doesn’t? You know what, son? Maybe I’d prefer a tomato sandwich with a little tumbler of bourbon over ice to all this heavy meat and potatoes.”
    I yanked a drumstick from the little fellow and the meat fell away as I sucked it from the bone in a single noisy slurp.
    “You and your father. You all eat like mountain men!”
    “I’ll ask Rosie to make you a sandwich.” I got up without apology, picked up the platter of tomatoes, and headed for the kitchen. Rosie was our housekeeper and cook; she had been in our family’s employ for nearly fifteen years. She was a single parent and lived on our property in one of the sharecropper cottages. Her fifteen-year-old son, Mickey, was one the sweetest kids I had ever known, probably because he had a healthy curiosity about everything and a great disposition. I pushed open the swinging door that separated the dining room from the kitchen.
    Rosie was stooped over the sink, scrubbing the roasting pan.
    “What can I get you?” she asked. When I told her she said, “Your momma’s right. It’s even too hot for sinning! Tell Miss Louisa I’ll have that sandwich to her in a jiffy.”
    “Thanks, Rosie. It’s easier just to give her what she wants. So, what’s Mickey up to tonight?”
    “Reading. What else? That child! He always has his nose in a book!”
    “That’s not a bad thing,” I said. “Not a bad thing at all. Maybe I’ll have a sandwich, too. We got any basil mayonnaise?”
    “We will in two minutes,” she said.
    I went over to the wet bar on the pantry side of the kitchen and poured Mother a drink. I stared at her tumbler for a moment and then poured a short one for myself.
    “The quail is delicious,” I said to Rosie on the way back to the dining room, and she smiled at me, giving me the “okay” hand signal over the whir of the pale green mayonnaise in the blender.
    I placed Mother’s drink before her with a minor clunk and went back to my seat, taking another quail to munch on until the sandwiches arrived.
    “Poor thing,” Mother said, raising her glass to me and taking a long sip. “Is she evah going to give me a grandchild?”
    “Doesn’t look very promising, does it?”
    “Maybe you should take her to someone up in New York.”
    “Maybe. I mean, it has to be a difficult thing to endure all the procedures she had with no positive results—you know, an assault on the value of her reproductive system or something like that.”
    Mother sighed hard enough to sway the Spanish moss that hung from every camellia bush and live-oak tree on our three thousand acres.
    “And to think I chose her for you! I should have had her examined by a doctor!”
    What a thing to say, as though we had been in the market for a broodmare. But it was true. In effect, we had been.
    I drained my bourbon in a long swallow, swished the ice around, and drained it again. There and then, I decided I’d had my fill of hopelessness in my life.
    “We’ve been discussing adoption,” I said. “Now and then it comes up.”
    “What?” Mother gasped and put her hand to her heart, or where one’s heart would be if one had one, and here came her most southern accent, the one reserved for dramatic presentations. “Ah think, no, Ah am certain that Ah heard you