The O'Briens Read Online Free Page B

Pontiac that year. Some days, looking up, Joe saw patterns of geese winging north in a soft blue sky, and the air had a sweetness and smelled of mud. He postponed the future and waited for Mick Heaney to show up, and watched his mother dying.
    Ellenora took no food and only a little water. The girls washed her every afternoon with soft yellow sponges and rubbed an ointment made from fat and mashed herbs on her sprouting bedsores. On the first of April it snowed a foot, and the old priest, wrapped in a buffalo robe and complaining bitterly of the cold, rode out from Sheenboro on a sleigh, heard Ellenora’s confession, and offered her the sacrament of extreme unction. She refused to see a doctor, and no one knew how much longer she would last. The wise woman with her blue bottle had been dead for years.
    The morning after the priest’s visit, Hope was hanging laundry on the porch when she caught sight of Mick Heaney coming up the road, and she hurried inside to tell Joe. Their stepfather had set his fiddle down on the porch and was pissing in a snowbank when Joe came up behind him, threw a harness strap over him, and knocked him down.
    Kate and Hope, shawls around their heads, breathing steam into the chilly air, watched Tom and Grattan kneel on Mick’s chest and Joe wrap his wrists and ankles with the same thick cord they used for tying up hogs and sheep. It had started snowing in large, wet flakes.
    Lemme gah, yuh sons a’ bitches.
    They tried to carry Mick into the barn but he writhed and bucked so frantically they dropped him on the frozen mud, where he lay snapping like a turtle, eyes violet against the skin of fresh snow.
    Tear yuh lip to hole, yuh crowd a’ skunks.
    â€œCome on, boys, let’s pick him up,” Joe ordered.
    Tom stood back, looking worried. “Do you really think we ought to?”
    â€œYeah, Joe, are you sure?” asked Grattan.
    Ah’ll fuckin crack the jaysus outta yuh. Lemme gah.
    Joe kicked Mick in the ribs, hard. Mick grunted and sucked breath, too startled to scream.
    â€œListen,” Joe said. Hunkering down, he caught the acrid stink of Mick’s breath. Their stepfather was flopping like a fresh-caught trout, sucking and biting air.
    â€œWe don’t care if you live or die,” Joe said softly. “There isn’t anyone to hear you, and no one to care if they did. So save your breath.”
    Mick stopped writhing and lay still. The whites of his eyes were stained yellow, his nose and cheeks strewn with a raw lacework of red and purple veins.
    Joe stood up and glanced at his sisters on the porch, wrapped in their shawls, fine faces pale with cold. His sisters’ thoughts and desires had always been obscure to him, as unknowable as the mental lives of animals, but he felt packed, latent, charged by his responsibility to protect them.
    Tom and Grattan were rubbing their feet on the ground like nervous cattle.
    â€œBoys,” Joe said, “this is the first of many.”
    Using the toe of his boot, he rolled Mick onto his stomach, then kicked as hard as he could. Mick yelped.
    â€œYou know what that’s for. Stay off those girls.”
    The snow was changing to a hissing, freezing rain. Powerful spring storms would soon be breaking down the last hunks of old snow, skid roads would be turning to mud, and another season in the woods would be over. Joe could smell open ground somewhere. If his father had not been killed in a skirmish on an African farm none of this would be happening. This day , he thought, might not exist .
    Mick snuffled. Joe pressed his boot firmly between his stepfather’s shoulder blades to prevent him rolling over or trying to stand up.
    It was the sort of day when a horse might slip on the skid road and break a leg. Rain would lacquer bare branches with drippings of silver, and soon it would be mud season, when nothing moved, when the ice on the river was too soft to bear weight, when everything was an argument