The Boys in the Trees Read Free Page B

and the longest eyelashes and a way of looking at you that made it hard to stay cross. If there was a crash of something breaking or an angry mother at the door, that would be Tom. He’d never been able to sit still, and though he was small for his age he would climb anything, try anything, fight even the biggest boy. He was always coming in with bruises and scrapes and I thought sometimes that if we lived in the country, if we had all that space where he could run and run. I wondered what kind of man he’d make, with his quick temper, his fidgets. But for all the trouble he caused hewas a kind boy, always standing up for the picked-on ones, always ready to laugh, and I thought that he’d be all right.
    •  •  •
    A man was giving a talk on Canada; William saw the notice on his way home and had to stand at the back of the crowded room.
It’s the place for us
, he said.
I wish you could have heard
. I said I had no intention of living in a cabin in the woods but he said I had the wrong idea, that we could go to one of the towns or a city, smaller than here and cleaner, everything new, even the air. Plenty of work for a man like him, he’d asked about that, and the kind of opportunities that would never come his way where he was.
And for the children
, he said,
just think of that, they could do anything there, be anything; it’s the future
. I said we could never afford the passage, and he said he’d worry about that. It was the most he’d said to me in months. William wasn’t much of a talker and I didn’t think I was either; I thought that was one way we were suited to each other. When we married I thought it would be difficult, to live so close with someone, but of course I had days to myself and in truth he was easier than my father, keeping his things tidy and taking off his boots at the door. I told him things, all kinds of things, lying in the dark with my mother’s quilt over us, and he asked me questions but rarely answered mine.
I don’t remember
, he would say, or,
I don’t know
, or,
I never think of it
. When the children were born my days were filled with talk and I babbled to them long before they could answer. William came home late with a pain behind his eyes; he took off his boots and ate his meal and sometimes read a newspaper he’d picked up. In the mornings he drank his tea while I roused the children and brushed and scrubbed them, cutting bread and tying laces and sometimes days went by when wehardly said a word to each other, when he was gone from my thoughts the moment he closed the door.
    I was always tired, slept like a stone unless one of the children called out, and then feeling my way back to the bed I was sometimes startled, touching William’s hard shoulder. Once I dreamed that I opened my eyes but was still in the dark; I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. I could hear quiet voices, could hear children crying, my children, and I tried with all my might to reach for them, to make a sound. And then it felt like I sat up with a roar, but William didn’t stir, so perhaps the roaring was somewhere in the dream I’d left. The room was pearly with the light of the first dawn and I could see then, I could move, but I didn’t sleep again.
    After having previously evacuated the stomach with ipecac, cauterize the fauces and the trachea with a strong solution of nitrate of silver, by means of a probang pushed into it while the epiglottis is held with a finger of the left hand. Repeat the operation every few hours. In addition a 50% solution of chloral hydrate may be applied with a hair pencil every half hour. The pain caused by it is sometimes severe.
    William had no use for religion, and although I had been a churchgoer all my life, when we moved across town it was too far to go back on my own and the new church just wasn’t the same. I gradually got out of the habit, though I was never quite easy about it. Still, it was nice to have a late breakfast all together on a Sunday, and