The Collected Stories Read Online Free Page A

past the Chair that evening, they didn’t even think of stopping. ‘It was nearly winter, the summer had gone, the ground was gettin’ too damp for playin’ on,’ and in ones and twos and threes they branched up their laneways till the girl and boy were left alone on the road to the village again. No rain had fallen, and their canvas shoes rustled through the dead leaves as they set to climb Cox’s Hill as on every other school evening of their lives.
    ‘Why were they all so quiet today? Was it because of the Chair, Teresa?’ he began at last.
    She didn’t answer for a long time and then she smiled, inwardly, sure of her superiority. ‘It might be.’
    ‘But why, why did they cheer?’ Her playful nonchalance was enough to rouse his anxiety to desperation.
    ‘You don’t know very much, do you?’ she said.
    ‘No, but can’t you tell?’
    ‘You don’t know how you come into the world, do you?’ she said, and he was shocked numb. He’d been told so many ways. He couldn’t risk making a greater fool of himself before Teresa. There was so much confusion.
    ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Do you know?’
    ‘Of course I know. Mammy explained everything to me and Maura ages ago, a day we were over at the bathing place in the lake. When we were drying ourselves with the towels after swimmin’ she told us everything.’
    In his mind he could see the picture of the lake and bathing suits and the woman talking mysteriously to the girls while they dried their naked bodies with the towels, but he was again bewildered when she added, ‘That’s the cause they shouted when you fell on Nora.’
    They shouted, ‘You’re in love,’ when he fell on Nora, he grasped back, desperate. What had the fall on Nora got to do with the way he’d been born? If they were the same thing, all Teresa had to do was to tell, a few words, and everything’d be explained. The cries at the Chair, the fear he’d felt around him all day would be explained – everything would.
    If he’d been quiet and had pretended not to care she’d probably have told him then, but immediately he produced the toffee bar, she drew away.
    ‘If you tell me, I’ll give you the bar,’ he told her softly.
    ‘Tell you what?’
    ‘How we be born, why they shouted.’
    ‘Why should I tell you? Tell you for a toffee bar and commit a mortal sin by telling you?’ and she strode quickly ahead.
    ‘It can’t be that much harm to tell and the toffee bar is new. I got it in Henry’s yesterday,’ he pleaded, more fearful now, the halo of sin over everything.
    ‘Have you anything else to give? A toffee bar isn’t enough.’ She began to relent and his heart beat faster. Her eyes were greedy on the bar in his hand, tiny scarlet crowns on its wrapping. He had one thing more, the wheel of a clock, the colour of gold, and it could spin.
    ‘There’s nothing else,’ he warned anxiously.
    ‘Give them to me first.’
    ‘And then you won’t tell?’
    ‘I’ll cross my heart.’
    She thumbed the rough shape of a cross on her dress and he gave her the bar and wheel.
    ‘Now,’ he urged when she seemed reluctant to begin.
    ‘I don’t know how to start,’ she said.
    ‘You crossed your heart.’
    ‘You have to try and guess first.’
    ‘You crossed your heart to tell.’
    ‘Can you not think?’ she ignored. ‘Do you not remember as we came to school Monday? Moran’s bull and Guinea Ryan with the cow? Can you not think?’ she urged impatiently.
    The black bull in the field last Monday as they came to school, the chain hooked to his nose, dragging Moran towards the cow that Guinea held on a rope halter close to the gate. The cow buckling toher knees under the first savage rise of the bull. He shuddered at what he’d watched a hundred times related to himself: all the nights his father had slept with his mother and done that to her; he’d been got that way between their sheets; he’d come into the world the way the calf came.
    ‘Can you not think?’ the girl