Reading by Lightning Read Free

voice.

    By the middle of the afternoon the sick-sweet smell of cooked citron fills Mrs. Feazel’s kitchen. Come here, says my mother. Sit down. You’re going to break something. They’re taking a rest in the living room, where it’s cooler, Mrs. Feazel and my mother. I’m standing between the curtain and the window, flicking away the dead flies lying on the window ledge with their legs in the air. This window ledge is Mrs. Feazel’s china cabinet, where she keeps her treasures lined up in a row. A clamshell with
Delta Manitoba
written on it in scrolled letters. A little brass dinner bell. Mr. Feazel’s pin from the war, a tiny Union Jack. And the gallstone Dr. Ross took out of her, a flattened, yellow-green egg, not polished like a stone but with an irritating surface, like the scale on the inside of a kettle.
    Come here, Lily, my mother says again.
    Mrs. Feazel reaches over and nudges the side of my face with her knuckle, the way a man would. Oh, she’s always been a restless one, she says. What a shock! My stars! We’re sitting there worrying about our dinners and all of a sudden
this
onegoes shooting out of the loft right in front of our eyes! Oh, my stars — what a shock! You could of broke your neck! And that
man!
She leans forward, clenching and unclenching her eyes the way Mr. Dalrymple does. She makes her voice oily and accusing:
I don’t mean any offence to the Piper family,
she says in Mr. Dalrymple’s voice,
but Satan will sometimes take hold of a little child and use that child to distract listeners from the Word of God.
She shakes her head, shock at her own daring on her big, frank face. Satan! she laughs in her jolly way. Oh, my, my, my. My mother crimps her lips together and doesn’t say a word. I step back and the rope my mother sends out pulls at me. It’s caught me, it’s coiled around both of us, a rope of secret fear.

    My mother has only Phillip and me to think about. All around us are families with gangs of children, like the Stallings and the Abernathys. On Sunday mornings they ride into the yard on a hayrack pulled by plow horses, or, if there’s a car and the gas to run it, they’re crammed into the back seat and clinging to the running boards. Our family, the object of pity and envy, begins with Phillip and ends with me (because of me, because of what I did to be born). But it’s our yard they come to, our barn, which had a church in the loft when we bought it.
    When I was a baby we lived in a rented house in Burnley. Then my dad bought this farm. I remember riding out in a truck with all our things in the back, sitting squeezed against Phillip, riding out of the rust-coloured mist of babyhood (where all that I knew of myself was told to me by other people) and into the brown and grey world of my dusty childhood. A man with a shy, lashless face (a rabbit’s face) is standing by the house. It’s Mr. Pangbourne. His wife has just died, his second wife, and he’s buried her by the first in the plot intended for himself, and is going back to the old country. The barn smells of freshly sawn wood. He built this barn because his old one fell down.He never used it for animals. While his wife was sick, he offered it to Mr. Dalrymple to use for a church.
    The house is old and has a summer kitchen tacked to the back of it. Its unpainted boards are silvered with age and shrunk down from the size they used to be. The minute Mr. Pangbourne drives out of the yard, my mother finds a book on a shelf in the pantry, The Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s just a stack of soft, thick pages tied up with string because the spine and covers have come off. In our new house in the evening she reads the story to us, about a man named Christian who has a heavy burden on his back that he can’t lay down, and so sets off on a long journey to the Celestial City, where he will be free of it. Crouching in the living room while my mother reads