The O'Briens Read Online Free

yours.”
    Whenever Joe brought home a crate of oranges, Grattan had always peeled off the colourful labels and pasted them in a scrapbook. When the old priest asked him, Grattan said that, more than anything else, he wanted to go to California.
    â€œI’ll write my Franciscan friends at Santa Barbara,” the old priest told Joe. “We’ll see if we can’t find your boy something to land on. He has just enough polish, and he knows how to work, thanks to you.”
    The priest had already written on Tom’s behalf to the Jesuits. When the time came, the Little Priest would start his scholastic training for the priesthood at St. John’s College, which had recently started calling itself Fordham, in the Bronx, New York.
    â€œI still have a few strings to pull, Joe, some reaching as far as Rome. A Jesuit in the family polishes the apple you’ll hand to God.”
    The old man must have known he was hurting himself by sending the children away. But perhaps he felt he had no choice, not at his time of life, not after the sins he had committed. The O’Briens were his seeds and he was going to scatter them. They would be his sacrifice, his offering.
    The younger children understood that the time was approaching when they would be cast into the world. In the meantime they needed to attend their mother, to hold on to her for as long as they could. When they finished saying the rosary, Hope untangled their mother’s beads from her fingers and they each kissed her lips, which were dry and tasted of salts. Later, while the others slept, Joe lay awake, planning how to deal with his stepfather. It would be best for family solidarity if Grattan and Tom took a hand.
    For once he was impatient for his stepfather’s return, and impatience kept him awake. When he tried to sleep, his thoughts fluttered on wings of their own, like birds caught in a house. It was possible Mick had been beaten up, even killed, in some tavern brawl — there were plenty of people, on both sides of the river, who had a score to settle. Maybe he was lying in a ditch somewhere, drunk or dead.
    Restlessness pumped a kind of acid through nerves and muscle, and Joe couldn’t keep from thrashing his limbs, from beating his pillow, from twisting and bunching his blankets. When he finally slept, he dreamed of a horse galloping across the river at breakup, ice slabs buckling under the pressure and rearing up in hunks to slash at the animal’s legs. He awoke panting and lay in the dark with eyes open, not moving, waiting for the anxiety stirred by the dream to subside before he got out of bed, pulled on his clothes, and awakened his brothers. As he pulled on his boots he remembered watching his father put on his own boots; the memory was just an image of powerful hands and fingers drawing yellow rawhide laces tight. Joe shook his head. Dreams and memories never really added up, and he had always tried to leave them in the bedroom as coldly as he could, not to waste daylight worrying about them.
    Before Tom and Grattan left for school, the three of them collected axe handles, staves, and rope and stored them in the cowshed. But Mick did not show that day, and the rest of the week didn’t see his shadow either. In the bright, cold March afternoons Joe tied on snowshoes and trudged out to count and mark the pulpwood neatly stacked along the banks of the Ottawa, acres of forest transformed into piles of raw logs. He stood to make a good profit, but that week found him making elementary mistakes in his accounts, strewing pages of his ledger with smudges and blots resembling the spoor of some animal from the deep woods — a wolverine, or a lynx.
    Joe was confident that he possessed the qualities needed for business success, and he was determined one day to have a family of his own. He knew the religious life was not for him; nonetheless, he could not stop feeling envious of the careful arrangements Father Lillis had