The Book of Emmett Read Online Free Page B

the promise of its nature.
    ***
    Friday nights are pay nights. Summer is grass green and it’s the blue of high skies and it’s the honey colour of sun. Days are spent in the envelope of yard in the housing commission place where the sea of grass waves high above their heads because Emmett doesn’t like to mow.
    Children chasing and squealing and playing Blackfoot, their game of stalking lizards and each other. Playing hard and laughing and chasing each other until all are breathless and sagging like spent sacks onto the grass to laugh and then again to play some more. To make soup with flowers with the sun falling around them like a cloak of light.
    There are only two Brown kids and all the other kids are from down the street. They’re allowed into the Brown yard but never into the house. Emmett doesn’t like other people’s brats. They are gathered around the bucket making daisy-weed soup when Emmett appears at the corner coming in from the street with a big box balanced on his shoulder like a greengrocer.
    â€˜Come on you mob,’ he yells loud and happy tonight. ‘Come and see what I got.’ He’s been to see his old mates at the market. When he was young he lived near there and worked its long aisles sweeping and scrounging. There was no choice, he said, either you gave the family a chop-out or you went back to the orphanage.
    Anne makes a space on the table. The screen door swings and the Brown children surge in on the wave of their father and there on the table is the biggest box of fruit they’ve ever seen. The neighbour kids watch for a while at the wire door but soon they are pulled away like small ghosts.
    A bristly pineapple and a watermelon like a striped sub marine and grapes as green as eyes and apples and cherries so dark and hard, all spill out of the box. The kids and Anne and even Emmett make earrings out of the cherries and eat some until their teeth turn red. Then Emmett takes out the big knife and swings it down into the watermelon and the slicing, sucking sound as he pulls it out is tidal. He cuts them slices bigger than their faces. They spit shiny black pips into the box and then Emmett is cutting pears and serving thin slices skewered onto the tip of the knife like a priest offering communion.
    Rob, his mouth full of cherries, says, ‘Dad, you should work at the market and we can always have fruit like this forever, wouldn’t that be good?’ Emmett pats the boy’s head, his hair so short his skull is visible. He smiles, his teeth still dark from the cherries.

3
    Emmett explains it to the kids in the square little kitchen. Nan’s rose plate is stuck high on the wall, Louisa thinks, like a portal to a better world. ‘Words,’ her father says, ‘are the key to life. There is nothin’ they can’t do.’ He glares at Rob, daring him to move. Rob, the boy who has trouble keeping still, looks down and boldly decides to fidget with his fork.
    When Emmett moves his searchlight gaze from him, Rob sneaks the fork off the table and under his leg, just to see if he can get away with something, anything. Sometimes Louisa feels winded by the high daring of her little brother. Why would you risk it?
    They understand Emmett loves words. Always has. He wanted to be a poet but he has to work for a living supporting these ungrateful brats instead. They all know he’s read Jack London’s book The Call of the Wild so many times that he can practically recite the thing from cover to cover. They don’t have a copy of it in the house so they can’t read it themselves, but boy do they know the story. Triumph over adversity – all the best stories have it. That, and a hero, you gotta have a hero. Emmett’s drummed it all into them.
    Emmett doesn’t write poems anymore. His words are cast into the amber liquid. These days he reasons he’ll just make the kids clever and this will reflect well. So on good days