The Stone Angel Read Online Free Page A

imaginable, like a water beetle busily boating on the surface of life.
    White wooden lace festooned the verandas in those days, sedate trimming on the beige brick houses such as my father had built. Once there was a craze for Japanese lanterns, hung from the painted lace, crimson and fragile paper, bulbous and thin, ribbed with bamboo, flamboyant with gilt dragons and chrysanthemums. In each lantern there was a candle which never stayed alight for long, it seemed, for some eager lanky boy was always shinnying up the porch pillars, match in hand, to set the glow again for the reel and schottische we twirled. Lord, how I enjoyed those dances, and can hear yet the stamping of our feet, and the fiddler scraping like a cricket. My hair, pinned on top of my head, would come undone and fall around my shoulders in a black glossiness that the boys would try to touch. It doesn’t seem so very long ago.
    In winter the Wachakwa river was solid as marble, and we skated there, twining around the bends, stumbling over the rough spots where the water had frozen in waves, avoiding the occasional patch where the ice was thin—“rubber ice,” we called it. Doherty from the Livery Stable owned the Manawaka Icehouse as well, and used to send out his sons with the dray and horses to cut blocks. Sometimes, skidding around a curve in the river, you’d see a dark place ahead, like a deep wound on the white skin of ice, and you’d know Doherty’s dray and ice-saw had been there that afternoon. It was at dusk, all shapes and colors having turned gray and indefinite, that my brother Daniel, skating backward to show off for the girls, fell in.
    The ice was always very thick where the blocks were cut, so it didn’t break around the edges of the hole. Matt, summoned by our shrieks, skated close and drew Dan up and away. It must have been thirty below, that day, and our house was at the far end of town. Odd that it never occurred to Matt or me to take Dan into the first house we came to, but no—we were only concerned to get him home before Father got back that evening from the store, so no one except Auntie Doll would need to know. His clothes had frozen before we reached the house, even though Matt had taken off his own coat and wrapped it around him. Father was home when we got there—just Dan’s bad luck, for he got railed at good and plenty for not watching where he was going. Auntie Doll gave him whisky and lemon, and put him to bed, and the next day he seemed all right. I don’t doubt he would have been, too, if he’d been husky to start with. But he wasn’t. When he came down with pneumonia, all I could think for days on end was the number of times I’d believed him to be malingering.
    The night Dan’s fever went up, Auntie Doll was over seeing Floss Drieser, Lottie’s aunt, who was a dressmaker. Auntie Doll was getting a new costume made, and she spent hours at the fitting sessions, for Floss heard everything that went on in Manawaka and was never shy about passing it on. Father was working late that evening, so only Matt and I were in the house.
    Matt came out of Dan’s bedroom with his shoulders bent forward as though he were hurrying somewhere.
    “What is it?” I hardly wanted to know, but I had to ask.
    “He’s delirious,” Matt said. “Go for Doctor Tappen, Hagar.”
    I did that, flying through the white streets, not minding how many drifts I stepped in nor how soaking my feet got. When I reached Tappen’s house, the doctor wasn’t there. He’d gone to South Wachakwa, Charlotte said, and the way the roads were, it wasn’t likely he’d be back until morning, if then. That was long before the days of snow-plows, of course.
    When I got back home, Dan was worse, and Matt, corning downstairs to hear what I had to say, looked terrified, furtively so, as though he were trying to figure out some way of leaving the situation to someone else.
    “I’ll go to the store for Father,” I said.
    Matt’s face changed.
    “No,