The Mary Smokes Boys Read Online Free

the stove was a chair with two sawn-off legs.
    Eccleston saw Grey staring at the chair and smiled.
    “Last night got cold.”
     
    THEY SAT AT the top of the backstairs.
    “Smoke?”
    Grey nodded and Eccleston lit two cigarettes at his lamp. The younger boy drew hard and choked and Eccleston smiled.
    He said they would go to light a fire on the creek tonight. Despite the season the creek was running with rain fallen in the west. In only a day it would be winter-still again.
    They sat in silence until seventeen-year-old Nyall Thiebaud arrived in a station wagon with his younger brother Matt.
    Nyall came holding a bandaged hand before his face.
    “Caught a splinter the size of a butter knife,” he said.
    “They milled late tonight,” said Eccleston.
    Nyall shook his head.
    “I bin at the hospital. Severed an artry. Went to the bone.”
    Eccleston sucked his teeth.
    In his good hand Nyall held a bottle.
    “Finest Scotch whisky eight dollars can buy.”
    “Good painkiller,” said Grey, quoting a man who came to his father’s card game.
    Eccleston and Nyall agreed. Grey smiled and looked at his boots and spat off the stairs.
    “This is Grey North. From next door.”
    Eccleston pointed to the yellow cottage across the way.
    “You’re the one whose mother died,” announced Matt Thiebaud.

    Grey nodded.
    Eccleston threw away his cigarette butt and furrowed his brow. Grey saw he had not known. Each fixed the other’s eyes. Grey nodded.
    “Ah, hell,” Eccleston whispered. “Ah, hell,” until his whispers were silent.
    Off the road and down the gravel drive came treading a long-gaited boy who Grey knew was Paul Offenbach–the way the boy pronounced his name would have been unrecognizable to his grandfather. Behind Offenbach waddled part-simple Raughrie Norman.
    Offenbach indicated his companion with a flick of his hand.
    “Look what I found on the road!”
    Raughrie Norman’s strawberry-blond hair blew across his bespectacled face in the chill wind. His slightly prognathic jaw jutted with the excitement and frustration he felt among the boys, of wanting very much to speak and having nothing to say. Norman was shuffled between grades for English and Art at Mary Smokes School. His teachers were perpetually undecided on the question of where he was least awkward. Sometimes he attended the special school at Toowoomba, though mostly he wandered without purpose from class to class at the school in the town where he was born and would never leave.
     
    ECCLESTON TURNED DOWN the lamp wick and left the lamp at the top of the stairs and pushed down his hat. The boys buttoned their duffel coats and pulled up their hoods and walked east to Mary Smokes Creek. Eccleston had dragged his left foot since the age of ten, when he was hung up in a stirrup pulling cleanskins out of the hills with his father, and he dragged it now across the country his father had years ago sold to August Tanner.
    The wind beat a loose sheet of shed iron in the north and hushed in the grass. When the wind dropped there was the sound of the stars: the immense and ancient roar of silence.
    They took the steep descent, holding onto grass and trees,
steeping sideways in unsure footholds, treading on stairs of tallowwood roots and petrified wood, and along a narrow footpath in the brush down onto the bend. At the bend a strip of gravely beach stepped into a slow-running pool that was sheltered by a jutting of earth and a lighting-struck red gum.
    Slabs of granite and basalt were settled in the bed and the water purled around them, though in time of heavy flood you heard the rocks grinding, the water turning them over. The water pooled and then riffled over rock and gravel bars both up and downstream of the bend. Debris was piled eight feet high on the branches of a she-oak on the outer curve.
    “When’d the creek ever get that high?”–“ When we were sleepin.”–“ When were we asleep?”–“The water knows when we’re asleep. Then it