Fall on Your Knees Read Online Free Page A

the back of the church Mrs Mahmoud’s heart broke, because how could that pale boy with no family and no real religion possibly know how to treat a wife? It’s a terrible thing for a mother to know that her daughter will not have the happiness she herself has had. But more than that — more than sorrow — was a chill. For she had seen something in his cup.
    Mahmoud didn’t beat his daughter, and he counted it a weakness that he’d never been able to bring himself to raise a hand to any of his girls for there was the root of the problem. The day after the horrible wedding, he instructed his wife to purge the house of Materia. He went to his shop and sealed himself in his back room while Mrs Mahmoud burned, snipped and bundled off his daughter’s memory. Materia’s favourite little sister, pretty Camille, cried for days. She and Materia had dreamed of marrying two handsome brothers: they would live side by side in big white houses and their children would grow up together; Materia would brush Camille’s beautiful straight black hair every night and they’d share a room just like always. Camille wrote a letter to Materia in large neat printing with x’s and o’s at the bottom, but Pa found it and burned it. He called Camille to him in the cellar and beat her.
    It wasn’t so much that the piano tuner was “enklese,” or even that he was not a Catholic or a man of means. It was that he had come like a thief in the night and stolen another man’s property. “And my daughter yielded.” There was a word for all this in the Old Country: ‘ayb . There was no translation, people in this country couldn’t know the depth of shame, of this Mahmoud was certain. There was no taking her back, she was ruined.
    But God is merciful and so was Mr Mahmoud. He allowed James to convert to Catholicism in exchange for his life. And Mr Mahmoud arranged for a good-sized house to be built for the newlyweds nine miles up the coast near Low Point. This was so he wouldn’t have to toss them from his doorstep a year from now when they turned up destitute. Such a thing would kill his poor wife.
    As for the yellow-haired dog who stole my daughter, may he rot. May he awaken to the contents of his mouth strewn across his pillow and may God devastate his dwelling… well, perhaps not the dwelling.
    As for my daughter. May God curse her womb.
    The night after Materia’s horrible wedding, Mrs Mahmoud opened her rosewood jewellery box. Immediately the little ballerina popped up and began to revolve to the strains of “The Anniversary Waltz”. Mrs Mahmoud peeled back the red velvet lining from the bottom and placed there her daughter’s long black braid, coiling it flat. She covered it with the velvet and replaced the beautiful things her husband had given her over the years — rubies, diamonds, moonstones and pearls…. Then she went into the big oak wardrobe where he would not hear her, and mourned.
    Materia never saw her family again. Her father forbade it. Her younger sisters were taken out of school and kept home till they were married. Materia’s older brothers were forbidden to kill the English bastard but, all the same, he had better keep out of their way. She was dead to them all from that day forth.
    James and Materia moved into their big two-storey white frame house, with attic, a month later. But just because it was new, doesn’t mean it wasn’t haunted.

Low Point
    What James resented most was that enklese nonsense. He wasn’t English, not a drop of English blood in him, he was Scottish and Irish, like ninety percent of this God-forsaken island, not to mention Canadian. Filthy black Syrians.
    “Lebanese,” said Materia.
    “What’s the difference, you’re better off without them.”
    There was no town or village at Low Point. There’d been small mines around here, some dating back to the first days of the French, but they were all closed up now. Though scratch anywhere and you’d find coal. The closest neighbour was a