Remembering the Bones Read Online Free Page B

and bends. I feel the extraordinary weight of myself, heavier than I know my body to be. It’s the sensation I have after a bath if I stay in the tub while the water is running out.
    It would be more of a worry, Georgie, if you couldn’t feel your body at all.
    That is the truth.
    The car doesn’t seem so far now, though it’s not easy to judge. I feel as if I’m upside down. My thoughts are scattered, like the glass leaves.
    I’ll try to remember what was in the car, front and back. My purse. Case’s gift, orange paper stuffed into the bag. I saw it drop somewhere as I flew past. My suitcase, in the trunk. Everything rearranged.
    I’m rearranged. I must order my thoughts. Right my body. If the mind can right itself, so can the body. I’ll try to imagine myself sitting, standing. But not climbing the side of the ravine. I can’t do that.
    Can’t?
    Didn’t I tell Case when she was a child, her small round face looking up at me, “Never say can’t”?
    Who said that?
    Every one of the women in my family for four generations, that’s who.

TEN
    I must keep my brain talking. Perhaps I tried the wrong prayer. The Creed was never relaxed, to my way of thinking. Not like the Lord’s Prayer.
    Prayers of my childhood. The sturdiness of Ontario stone. Our solid country church on the Wilna Creek Road. Ally took my hand as we followed Grand Dan, Phil and Mr. Holmes up the aisle every Sunday, our own small footsteps echoing theirs. We slid across the third-row pew on the right, the same in which Danforths had been accountable to God for generations. Grand Dan presided, and cast an eye back over the narrow room before she kneeled to pray. She had smacked the bare bottoms of more than half the congregation, and had forced their first intake of breath. I suppose she considered all of us her children—we who had been delivered into her long fingers, we who had been anointed with olive oil poured to a saucer by her caring midwife’s hands.
    We stood for the Apostles’ Creed and I waited for the part where everyone bobbed heads at the same instant. Betweenhalf-closed lids, I caught rows of nods out of the corner of my eye. Grand Dan, high above me—long and thin in a plain grey coat that hung to her ankles—looked down with a different head movement, one I well understood, to let me know I was not to stare. I was expected to join in, and I did my best, speeding the lines, trying not to think of the countless bums Grand Dan had smacked and what the congregation would look like if they suddenly dropped their drawers and bared them.
    We had to kneel for the Lord’s Prayer, and we flipped the kneeling board towards us on its hinges. At the end of the service, we flipped it back. I liked the mechanics of the kneeling board, the collaboration of sharers of the pew. It was about silent co-operation, timing, eye and hand signals. The board yielded; it was out of sight. As it disappeared, I rolled my eyes skyward and whispered for my dead grandfather’s benefit, Structure determines function , thinking how pleased he must have been when he had sat in the same pew. That was the second of his principles, his three grand thoughts, the ones I found written in his handwriting on the inside cover of Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical by Henry Gray.
    During my childhood, it was my stinging regret that I did not have the opportunity to meet my grandfather, Dr. Matthias Danforth, who was born in Wilna Creek but went away to Toronto to be educated as a physician. He returned in 1900 at the start of a promising new century, and married the woman he loved, the midwife with the long black hair and the no-nonsense reputation, the woman who had waited for him while he completed his education. He began to work at the newly constructed three-storey hospital in the growing town of Wilna Creek. The roads were no longer made of planks, and cedar boardwalks were gradually being replaced. His parentswere dead and he and his black-haired bride moved two