Kalila Read Online Free Page B

howl.
    Honey, rabbits die when they get old. Marigold helps herself to a scone. To mitigate their grief, the girls go for thirds of my quick-thawed Nanaimo bars.
    He didn’t suffer. Marigold curls Francine’s damp bangs around a finger. Come, sit here, sweets, to Suzette.
    Suzette curls against her mom and takes a bite. We found Tops this morning with his teeth like this — head against Marigold’s breast, Suzette bucks her teeth, chocolate oozing. He was flopped in his cage, ears stuck straight out. Suzette falls sideways against her chair and holds the pose. Plum dead and gone. She takes a gulp of Kool-Aid. Coughs.
    Francine swallows a cranky belch. Auntie Maggie, is your baby going to die? She isn’t even old!
    Time pushing out like kilometres. Cousin Danny’s grade ten photograph perched on his coffin at the front of the country church, his smile a light shining on the congregation as they looked back and wept. Uncle Ty leaning heavy on Auntie Prue’s arm, his countenance wild and in motion. Farmers, wives in Sunday best, pouring like a river into our country church.
    We sang, the Watson girls. Marigold and I, soprano, Rose, high tenor, Iris carried the alto. June galloping the piano.
    Under His wings, I am safely abiding ,
    Though the night deepens and tempests are wild …
    Danny had drawn a picture in art class, a flock of wild geese rising in blue sky. The teacher drove it out to Uncle Ty’s farm and handed it over, one last gift from Danny, the least that she could do . The minister taped the drawing behind the pulpit. Later, Auntie Prue and Uncle Ty had it transcribed onto Danny’s gravestone. Engraved above the birds’s flight, Safe under the shelter of thy wings .
    I believed it.
    Marigold, gently gathering up their things and ushering out the girls. Come, honey, come on, girls, no, Auntie Maggie needs to be alone.

    My stomach skidded with strange excitement at the sadness that engulfed the congregation, like a shiver without release, as we sang, the Watson girls, to a church chock full, intent, grief-stricken faces, the overflow crowd pressed together in the foyer, down the stairs, and out the door into the churchyard.
    Under His wings, under His wings
    Who from His lo-ove can sever …
    I breathe in the pulse of Danny’s funeral, the gusty hymns, the storm of sobbing, heat rising like a fever. Marigold and I played frozen tag with Danny’s sisters between the funeral and lunch. Warm comfort of mini cabbage rolls, buns and sausage, cherry squares, and bundt cake, which migrated us all together in Auntie Prue’s cheery sunlit kitchen. The church women bustling, counting teacups, clucking, sighing, arranging cheese and salami platters while Marigold and I and Danny’s little sisters dashed through the kitchen, stealing lemon meringue tarts on the run. Over the years we climbed on Danny’s gravestone, played leapfrog over it, drank Freshie and ate homemade cookies on it during vacation Bible school. It never made me sad. This gathering before the dead seemed natural, sustaining, like the expectation of pale shoots in the potato bin’s dim corner of the cellar. We ran barefoot through the tended grass, stopped to read the gravestones: Orkney Island Schallhorn, 1923–1925, Little Lamb of God ; Ida E. Alberta, 1935–1967, Loving wife and mother ; Cyrus Persida, In Him We Have Our Rest . Joseph Callan, June 1914–September 1914, Tread Gently. A Dream Lies Buried Here . And I imagined extraordinary lives in extraordinary worlds. Death a mere curiosity, an intriguing step beyond.
    While Uncle Ty moved through that July and August in a kind of stunned persistence, his love for his remaining children grew desperate, each earache a potential deafness, each sore throat, meningitis. Stuffed full of vitamins, antibiotics, antihistamines, the cousins played.
    I cheerfully killed off my dolls one by one: drowned Hazel in the water trough, climbed