The Collected Stories Read Online Free Page B

urged.
    ‘Is it like the bull and the cow?’ he ventured. It couldn’t be, it would be too fantastic, and he waited for her to laugh.
    Instead, she nodded her head vigorously: he had struck on how it was.
    ‘Now you’ve been told,’ she said. ‘That was why they cheered when you fell on Nora.’
    Suddenly, it was so simple and so sordid and so all about him that it seemed he should have discovered it years before.
    They were silent now as they went downhill home, a delicate bloom on the clusters of blue sloes along the road, the sudden gleam of the chestnut, the woollen whiteness of the inside of a burst pod in the dead leaves their shoes went rustling through. ‘They’re in love! ‘They’re in love!’ coming again to his ears but it was growing so clear and squalid that there was hardly anything to see.
    The whole world was changed, a covering torn away; he’d never be able to see anything the same again. His father had slept with his mother and done that to her, the same father that slept with him now in the big bed with the broken brass bells and rubbed his belly at night, saying, ‘That’s what’s good for you, Stevie. Isn’t that what you like, Stevie?’ ever since it happened the first night, the slow labouring voice explaining how the rubbing eased wind and relaxed you and let you sleep.
    He’d come out of his mother’s body the way the calf came – all at school had seen the calves born on their farms. And in Aughoo churchyard, at the back of the sacristy and under the shade of the boundary ash tree, his mother’s body was now buried; the body his father had done that to, out of which he’d come; the body in a rotting coffin, under the clay, under the covering gravel. NT was after her name on the limestone cross they’d bought in Smith’s for thirty pounds. They’d lifted three withered daffodils out of the jam jar when they’d visited it last July, weeded the daisies and dandelions out of the white gravel. And there had been trouble tooover the shrub of boxwood their aunt had planted on the grave. It had already taken root, and their father had torn it up in anger. He had called to their aunt’s house on their way home, shouting that she had no business interfering with his wife’s grave and he didn’t want to have them rooting up a stupid tree when it came to his own turn to go the way of all flesh.
    His eyes followed his feet as they went through the leaves. He had been shattered by his mother’s going, the unexpected mention of her name could still break him, but even that was growing different. His mother had lain down naked under his naked father years ago, his beginning: it was good to stand in the daylight of the others for once and not to be for ever a child in the dark.
    While he walked, his wondering changed to what it would be like to rise on a girl or woman as the bull rose; if he could know that everything would be known. If he could get Teresa to lie down for him some evening on their way, behind the covering of some sloe bushes – could he ever bring himself to ask her to do that for him? His body was tingling and hot as the night in convalescence he’d watched his mother undress and get into the bed that she’d moved into his room at the height of his illness, snowflakes drifting round the windows that winter evening and robins about the sills, the room warm and bright later with the fire and low nightlight, and he’d ached to creep into her bed and touch every part of her body with his lips and the tips of his fingers. Teresa was now walking very fast ahead on her own.
    He shuddered as the vision of the animals coupling came again, his father doing that to his mother years ago, out of which he’d come, her body in the clay of Aughoo now with worms and the roots of dandelions, and his father rubbing his belly at nights in the iron bed with the broken brass bells.
    ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come: thy will be done on earth,’