Reading by Lightning Read Free Page B

leaving any minute — nothing the drought can do to us matters, the cracks it’s opening up in the fields (so wide and deep that Joe Pye loses his wrench down one of them), the Russian thistle taking over a corner of the prairie that should never have been broken. These are
signs,
they mean Jesus is coming soon. They’re intended to fire up our faith, like a girl seeing a dust cloud on the horizon and knowing it means her boyfriend is driving up the road.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus,
Mr. Dalrymple cries in the loft, lifting his arms. I sit on the bench between my parents and reach inside and touch my memory of what he shouted that day (about Satan, about me), touch it delicately to see if it still throbs, and it does. I turn my eyes up to the rafters. I can see the frail stretched necks of the swallow chicks, their wide beaks reaching up, up from the mud nest towards something none of us sitting below can see.
    I have inside me my own private picture of what lies ahead, the other world. I come across it sometimes when I’m lying in bed, halfway to sleep. I come across it in the dark, in a dark alcove of my mind, like a shrine lit up with guttering candles. It’s from a place too far back for memory. I’m in the middle ofthe yard. Orange light blazes in the sky, flames fill the windows of the barn. The barn door is wide open and men come out, carrying something heavy, a body, sagging like a grain sack. They’re stooped, they’re trying to be gentle, carrying him. His head lolls. One limp arm drags on the ground, like when they took Jesus down from the cross, and a man scoops it up and drapes it across his chest. They prop him against the side of the barn and bend over him. I can see his white shirt, his body drooping back against the barn. I’m very small, just eyes and exhausted, shallow sobs that batter my chest like hiccups.

    While everyone waits for Jesus, I persist in growing. My mother’s cutting an old dress of hers down for me. I stand by the chesterfield in bare feet on the cold floor and she tucks and pins the bodice. I am ten or eleven, much smaller than she is. There will be fabric left over, and she’ll stitch it into squares for potholders.
    I shrink from her touch, from the prickling touch of the wool, clench my stomach and arms. Being close like this draws confidences from her. She tells me the story of her school friend who died after she breathed in a popcorn kernel and it festered in her lung. And about Felix Macdonald, the villainous farmer she worked for on the Bicknell road. And the harrowing story of my birth, when she first saw me folded and slimy like a calf, so small they pulled a mitten over my head to keep me warm. She winds backwards into this story — soon she’ll get to
placenta,
a word she has a special, privileged knowledge of.
Afterbirth,
other people say, but my mother has reason to know better. She crouches, reaching blindly for the pins, her eyes half closed with the largeness of it, the way she was led down, down, into the Valley of Death. Five more minutes and they would have lost me, she says.
    While my mother bends over the hem, my father comes inand stands in the kitchen doorway drinking water from the dipper. A new frock! he says. You’ll be fending off the lads in that. He has his cap on. I can’t see his eyes, but I know he’s looking at me.
    The screen door slams behind my father. I feel warm where his eyes touched me, hope blooming in patches on my arm and shoulder. Sudden hope for this dress, which is brown wool, with deep notches in its too-big lapels and cuffs, different from the dresses other girls have. The
lads,
he says, because he’s English. Jimmy Thrasher, he must mean, at the blacksmith shop. One day I was outside by the wagon, measuring the space between the spokes of the wheel with my bare foot, when Jimmy Thrasher came out and dumped a shaft in the wagon and reached over to pull on a string of my hair.