When the Saints Read Free Page B

mother took all the kids away, and by the time she came back, the house had been looted and there were flies everywhere. Someone had even stepped right over Cleary’s corpse to snatch his Crosley radio. The church took up a collection, but she blew it on a flashy car of her own.
    “She said it was her due for having put up with all them brawls,” Grandma Jean said. “But everyone knew there weren’t nothing that woman loved more than the smack of a fist into a jaw. She used to pick up the bloody teeth off the floor and keep them for souvenirs, show them to us kids at the breakfast table while she re-enacted the fight. You’d be sitting there eating oatmeal and the next thing you knew, she’d have you in a headlock.” She clicked her tongue. “Point is, the mayor, the farmers, even my own crazy ma weren’t nothing but thieves, every last one of them. People say all the trouble started with your father’s people,but that’s just sweet-smelling bullshit. Garnet Saint didn’t invent crime in Solace River.”
    We used to have a self-portrait of Garnet hanging in our house. I can still see that big nose and the boxy black hat slipping to one side of his head. From what I heard, he was a teenage runaway who wormed his way into a small crew making rum runs from St. Pierre Island to New York during Prohibition until he got kicked out for having a big mouth. Then he tried to break in with the moonshiners on McNabs Island but wound up running a crooked Wheel of Chance on the pleasure grounds.
    Grandma Jean said Garnet Saint probably wasn’t even Grandpa Jack’s real father, but that Jack’s mother abandoned him in a Halifax rooming house and Garnet offered to take him off the landlady’s hands. He skipped town with little Jack and headed for the Annapolis Valley, never staying in one town long enough for people to catch on to his monkeyshines.
    “The baby was his meal ticket,” Grandma said. “Garnet fed him nothing but rotten fish and sips of hooch so he’d always be passed out or spitting up. He’d moan that his poor Jack was dying so ladies’ charities would give them money for medicine.”
    They arrived in Solace River around the time Garnet’s knees began to wear out. Jack was about seven years old by then. They’d come looking for an old carny buddy of Garnet’s, but the man was long dead. They squatted in the old schoolhouse, started stealing chickens and piglets until they had enough of a farm to feed themselves, and for the next ten years scraped by on just the odd con. Garnet had a shed full of painted rocks that he sold to passersby as
Genuine Meteorites!
He also toutedhis services as a sort of hillbilly clairvoyant, a walking talking farmer’s almanac who could tell with a sniff of the air and a coin slapped to his palm which crops would do well that season. Of course, that ruse lasted only one season. Next, he concocted a tincture of pig’s blood and tree sap and tried selling it door to door as a cure-all, but by then no one was buying his crap. Garnet swore the joke was on them, claimed Saint’s Elixir restored not only the cartilage in his knees but also the muscle in his pants. He and his new-found vitality went around molesting people’s wives and daughters until someone did the whole town a favour and beat him to death with a tire iron behind the gas station. Jack was only a young teenager at the time. He went off to war to earn a wage and came back with a sickly little waif who died with my father still inside her. They had to cut Daddy right out of her stomach.
    Grandma Jean stitched this all together from jagged scraps of memory and town gossip. My father was like a period at the end of the story, but of course it didn’t end there. Why the hell Ma married Daddy, I’ll never understand.
    After about an hour, I’m sick of thinking about it. I stand up, spit in the river and head back up the road.
    W EST IS STANDING BARE-CHESTED IN THE KITCHEN when I let myself in. He gets a hard-on as