The Stone Angel Read Online Free Page B

you won’t,” he said with sudden clarity. “It’s not Father he wants.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Matt looked away. “Mother died when Dan was four. I guess he’s never forgotten her.”
    It seemed to me then that Matt was almost apologetic, as though he felt he ought to tell me he didn’t blameme for her dying, when in his heart he really did. Maybe he didn’t feel that way at all—how can a person tell?
    “Do you know what he’s got in his dresser, Hagar?” Matt went on. “An old plaid shawl—it was hers. He used to go to sleep holding it, as a kid, I remember. I thought it had got thrown out years ago. But it’s still there.”
    He turned to me then, and held both my hands in his, the only time I ever recall my brother Matt doing such a thing.
    “Hagar—put it on and hold him for a while.”
    I stiffened and drew away my hands. “I can’t. Oh Matt, I’m sorry, but I can’t, I can’t. I’m not a bit like her.”
    “He wouldn’t know,” Matt said angrily. “He’s out of his head.”
    But all I could think of was that meek woman I’d never seen, the woman Dan was said to resemble so much and from whom he’d inherited a frailty I could not help but detest, however much a part of me wanted to sympathize. To play at being her—it was beyond me.
    “I can’t, Matt.” I was crying, shaken by torments he never even suspected, wanting above all else to do the thing he asked, but unable to do it, unable to bend enough.
    “All right,” he said. “Don’t then.”
    When I had pulled myself together, I went to Dan’s room. Matt was sitting on the bed. He had draped the shawl across one shoulder and down onto his lap, and he was cradling Dan’s head with its sweat-lank hair and chalk face as though Dan were a child and not a man of eighteen. Whether Dan thought he was where he wanted to be or not, or whether he was thinking anything at all, I don’t know. But Matt sat there like that for several hours, not moving, and when he came down to the kitchen where I had finally gone, I knew Dan was dead.
    Before Matt let himself mourn or even tell me it was over, he came close to me and put both his hands on me—quite gently, except that he put them around my throat.
    “If you tell Father,” Matt said, “I’ll throttle you.”
    That was how little he knew of me, to imagine I might. I used to wonder afterward, if I had spoken and tried to tell him—but how could I? I didn’t know myself why I couldn’t do what he had done.
    So many days. And now there comes to mind another thing that happened when I was almost grown. Above Manawaka, and only a short way from the peonies drooping sullenly over the graves, was the town dump. Here were crates and cartons, tea chests with torn tin stripping, the unrecognizable effluvia of our lives, burned and blackened by the fire that seasonally cauterized the festering place. Here were the wrecks of cutters and buggies, the rusty springs and gashed seats, the skeletons of conveyances purchased in fine fettle by the town fathers and grown as racked and ruined as the old gents, but not afforded a decent concealment in earth. Here were the leavings from tables, gnawed bones, rot-softened rinds of pumpkin and marrow, peelings and cores, pits of plum, broken jars of preserves that had fermented and been chucked reluctantly away rather than risk ptomaine. It was a sulphurous place, where even the weeds appeared to grow more gross and noxious than elsewhere, as though they could not help but show the stain and stench of their improper nourishment.
    I walked there once with some other girls when I was still a girl, almost but not quite a young lady (how quaintly the starched words shake out now, yet with the certain endearment). We tiptoed, fastidiously holding theedges of our garments clear, like dainty-nosed czarinas finding themselves in sudden astonishing proximity to beggars with weeping sores.
    Then we saw a huge and staggering heap of eggs, jarred and broken by some