Owls Do Cry Read Online Free

tiny trotters thrust out stiff; of the Woollen Mills, the chocolate factory, the butter factory, the flour mill – all meaning prosperity and wealth and a fat filled land; and lastly a photograph of the foreshore with its long sweep of furious and hungry water, the roll-down sea the children call it, where you cannot bathe without fear of the undertow, and you bathe carefully, as you live, between the flags; and beware of the tentacles of sea-weed and the rush of pebbles being sucked back and back into the sea’s mouth each time it draws breath. Certainly, inside the breakwater is a little shovel-scoop of bay, Friendly Bay, where you paddle and sail shells and eat ice cream bought from Peg Winter, the mountainous woman who moves like faith from town to town, leaving behind her a trail of sweet and ice cream shops, almost as if they dropped from her pocket, like crumbs or seeds springing into red and white painted shape, with cream-coloured tables and chairs inside, and other high swivel-chairs as the dizzying accompaniment to a caramel or strawberry milk shake.
    And glass cases packed with chocolate, dark or milk, fruity or plain.
    Everything in a glass case is valuable.

5
    Sings Daphne from the dead room
.
    Sometimes in this world I have thought the night will never finish and the real city come no nearer and I think I will stand for a breath under the huge blue-gum trees that I have in my mind. My eyes are used to the dark and as I see the tall trees with their bark half-stripped and the whitish flesh of trunk revealed underneath, I think of my father saying to me or Toby or Francie or Chicks
,
    —
I’ll flay the skin off your hide, I will
.
    And I know that a wild night wind has spoken those same words to the gum trees. I’ll flay the skin off your hide
.
    And there is the skin hanging in strips. I smell the blue-grey gum-nuts, five ounces of them, flavoured and nobbly under my feet, and I take off my shoes and the gum-nuts dig in my feet and I walk to the foreshore of Waimaru where the sea will creep into the sleep of people and flow round andround in their head, eating out caverns where it echoes and surges till the people become eroded with the green moth and all cry inside themselves, Help, Help
.
    And then even the sun travels from dark to dark and I am not the sun
.
    Yes, even the sun
.
    And why will it rain so much after the night?
    Rain
.
    Up north in the winter-time or midsummer the rain drips in sheets of silver paper, my mother said, who lived there a long time ago, where there are wasps in swarms and a blossom week and palm trees, imported; where the daffodils are earlier than here, with wider and frillier trumpets, and the flowers more bright, painted, growing in the superlatives of memory; and the sea, why the sea more blue and warm and churned in the summer time with sharks whose presence is reported in the newspapers
,
    Seen on the green lawn
.
    And the footpath in the northern city?
    It melts under your feet
.
    And the rain falls in silver paper
.
    And a kingfisher, colour-fast, will sit on a telegraph wire and be stroked and sing with the silver dazzle
.
    Oh Francie, Francie was Joan of Arc in the play, wearing a helmet and breastplate of silver cardboard. She was burned, was burned at the stake
.

6
    It was an afternoon in a hall filled with people, girls in their white spun silk, each holding shilling bags of coconut ice, pink and white, from the home-made sweet stall; mothers who smelled like a closed room of talcum powder and stored fur; with their parcels from the handwork sale, tablerunners and tea-showers in lazy-daisy and chain and shadow stitch.
    It was the last day of the term and Francie’s last day at school though she was only twelve, thirteen after Christmas. She could count up to thirty in French. She could make puff pastry, dabbing the butter carefully before each fold. She could cook sago, lemon or pink with cochineal, that swelled in cooking from dirty little grains, same, same,