Jake's Long Shadow Read Online Free Page B

presence, too.
    Back there was the man who had traumatised his children — my beloved step-children — especially Huata, who was as angry, messed-up a child as Charlie had ever encountered. (But we got there, didn’t we, son? Look at you now.) Polly, being Polly, was the least damaged of Jake’s children, but a handful nonetheless for the first couple of years. And Mark, when he was released from the welfare boys’ home into Beth and Charlie’s custody, was on his way from being the boy to the man, and what a man. But even then in need of Charlie’s support to rid him of the stain of Jake.
    Charlie saw the children change and eventually blossom in their different ways. It was only Abe who Charlie didn’t get to know as he was a young adult when Charlie came on the scene. The other three he loved as his own. (I took your children, Jake, and gladly made them mine. I earned the right to be called their father, you violent, drunken loser.) Charlie, taken by surprise at Jake’s effect on him.
    He was trembling and it was rage. He wanted to go back and confront Jake, humiliate him in front of his pals by asking what kind of man was he who could beat up a woman. So overcome with this sudden onset of anger, he had crazy thoughts of rushing back and snatching one of their rifles andputting a bullet between Jake’s eyes. (All this time and I didn’t know how much I hated him.)
    If truth be told he was scared of himself now, for Charlie remembered taking the opposite stance when Beth was waxing bitter about Jake. He had suggested she try and understand Jake’s background, his lack of self-esteem, that there was most certainly a history to Jake that went back several generations . Now he wanted to kill the man. (I’m a hypocrite.)
    But common sense ruled supreme in Charlie Bennett’s life (as always). So he continued back to his vehicle, forcing out the anger, getting it off the stove before it boiled over.
    Back in his car he revved the engine and turned the radio up loud, on a country-and-western station he preferred, drowning out the thoughts — no, these are not thoughts, they’re pure and simple feelings. This is emotion. And you, Charlie, are always throwing off at others of your race for letting emotion rule their lives. Settle yourself down, man. And
be
a man. Don’t become what he is, Mr Pig Hunter back there, still the macho child. Be what you are, Charlie Bennett.
    That didn’t stop him stuffing a cream bun in his mouth.
    He drove home fighting to bring his emotions under control. For the first time in his life he was seething with desire to do violence. And outside the sky had darkened rapidly, thunder clouds coming out of nowhere, the heavens readying to roar. Jake’s features seared into a man’s mind, as if he knew something (of me, my weaker side?), too. Or did it go deeper than that, to mean Beth?

CHAPTER FOUR
‘I WAKE AND FEEL THE FELL OF DARK’ — GERARD MANLY HOPKINS
    SO DARK. ELEVEN o’clock in the morning and it’s dark; day’s got this shadow over it, like a blot. A moving blot in the way of every flower, every tree and lovely living thing, which, when I do have times of seeing how lovely, I want to cry the more at the dark soon to return. At the dark laid over me like scales on my skin.
    It’s something got said, or decreed of me, that this life and its beauties and bounties aren’t for you, kid. (Kid?) I’m an adult (and yet inside I feel like this child who is denied the right to grieve for herself, since she is not sure what ails her so).
    Twenty-nine years old and I still call myself kid. And even the times when life does reveal that it could be better (it could be, couldn’t it?) it’s still saying: but not for long, Sharneeta, ’cos you don’t deserve to see beauty, to know happiness and stuff like that.
    Why, I just don’t know. It just is.
    And no matter how far I reach