Reading by Lightning Read Free Page A

aloud to us, I peer through a crack below the windowsill and see a chicken walk by outside.
    When my mother finally puts the book down I tell them about seeing a chicken through the wall. This house was built by an eight-year-old boy taking instructions from a blind man, says Joe Pye, who that very afternoon walked up the lane from nowhere and sits now at the kitchen table chewing on a matchstick.
    When winter comes my dad and Joe haul the stove in from the lean-to kitchen and install it in the living room. Dad pulls off the pie plate that was nailed over the chimney hole to keep mosquitoes out of the house. They keep a miniature inferno going in that stove, my dad and Joe, burning wood cut down by the river. They nail shingles over the cracks in the walls, but the wind finds new cracks every day.
    In the barn our new cows sleep standing up. Down the road the Stalling girls sleep three to a bed and two beds to a room. I sleep in my own bed in my own room in our leaky house. All night I revolve over the mattress, dreams peeling off me. It’s dark when I wake up to the cows moaning about the painful weight of their udders. My mother comes in andpries me out into air as cold as knives. Last year a house up the road burned down, killing four sleeping children while their parents did chores in the barn. Would you leave children alone in a house with a fire burning in the stove? people asked one another in low voices. Every dark morning my mother drags me and Phillip whimpering to the barn to be sure no neighbour will ever have cause to say such a thing about her.
    When I turn six it’s Phillip who takes me down the long dirt road to school. I wear a blue dress and bloomers made from a flour sack. We stop and examine a massive badger hole at the first corner. Goldenrod blooms among the thistles in the ditch. I manage to break off a tough stem of it and hold it up to my blue dress. I wish I had a pin, I say. Phillip walks backwards, watching with delight while I pull up the bodice of my dress and gnaw a little hole in the fabric to stick the stem through. You will get such a licking, he says.
    At school I copy mottoes written on the chalkboard in Miss Fielding’s large, childish hand while Miss Fielding stands against the windows with a burn mark in the shape of an iron on her skirt, placidly watching. I learn the times tables, and every morning we recite them, standing in a wavering row across the front of the schoolroom, breathing in the smell of wet mittens baking on the stove.
Two
is pale and silver-haired, overworked but willing.
Five
is a domineering, round-faced girl, her hair cut severely into a black fringe. When it’s Five’s turn she hauls the other numbers with her to Fifteen, Twenty, Twenty-five, Thirty, she puts up with no argument. (At Twenty-five, she gazes in delight at her twin and they drink tea together.) I stand between Betty Stalling and my cousin Gracie, chanting along with them, stories flickering through my brain. Stand up straight, Lily, says the teacher, but I slump against the blackboard, exhausted by the affairs of generations of numbers.
    We have no chalk, there’s no money to buy chalk, but there’sa fancy table map donated by a rich lady named Mrs. Alexander. Its mountains are built up in plaster. The peaks of the Andes and the Alps are all chipped off — the exposed plaster is flat, but it could be snow. The Rockies are intact but black from children rubbing at them. England is a little island like a misshapen cucumber. The
old
country. I have cousins there: Lois and Madeleine and George (although George is not quite my cousin. He’s not really their boy, my mother says in the disgruntled voice she uses for people she knows nothing about. He’s an orphan they took in).
    In England my father lived in a house made of brick, Joe Pye in a house made of stones. Here, in Nebo, Manitoba, everything is made of wood, and flimsy. This world is not our home. We’ll be