A Good House by Bonnie Burnard Read Free Book Online Page A

his cornflakes. His large eyes were an unusual grey-green, a colour previously unseen in any generation on either side, and the lashes that protected his large eyes were as long and thick and dark as a movie star’s. Two of the girls in his grade-nine homeroom had already told him they would kill for those lashes.
    If there was one trait the family shared, one thing that might have been locked in their genes and thus anticipated down the line, it was their extraordinarily beautiful, fine-boned hands. Bill’s hands too, or maybe especially, even taking into account the fingers that had been blasted off in the North Atlantic.
    Murray McFarlane, who was only an inch shorter than Paul but lanky and not so sure, not so deliberately physical in his movements, was in grade thirteen with Patrick and over the years since the summer of the circus he had gradually worked himself into the Chambers family. He had not disappeared after Daphne’s fall, as another boy might have. He ate with them if he was around when a meal was put on the table, volunteered to help Patrick and Paul with seasonal chores like digging out after a big snowfall, taking the storms down, raking and burning the leaves at the edge of the creek in the fall. He exchanged with all of them modest and unusual Christmas presents: an abacus, a bubble-gum dispenser, a brass nameplate for the unused front door, which Bill promptly nailed to the back door.
    In a nod to social convention, Patrick was sometimes invited to have dinner with Murray’s family but these invitations were always date-specific and issued well in advance. Murray’s parents were extremely devout Anglicans and quite a bit older, in their early sixties. Murray had been a last-chance baby. Both of his parents had been the only surviving offspring of very prosperous families and this misfortune allowed them many of the formalities and much of the ease of wealth. Mr. McFarlane’s younger, bachelor brother Brady, whose boisterous good nature had been admired by some, had lived a short life ruled and eventually ended by the bottle and Mrs. McFarlane had lost a very young brother before the first war, to meningitis, and after the war a sister, her twin, to what the doctors thought must have been a cancer of the breast. Along with a double portion of prime, leased-out farmland, the McFarlanes owned a good third of the buildings on Front Street and the biggest feed mill in the county, which Murray’s father continued to run, to keep himself occupied. They lived in Mrs. McFarlane’s family home. It was one of the houses with a modest turret and a wide wraparound porch and Mrs. McFarlane sometimes entertained a few friends on her porch, with card tables set up for an afternoon of bridge or a summer luncheon.
    Murray carried the loneliness common to his circumstances with no complaint. On a summer night he might take Daphne and maybe a couple of her girlfriends out to the lake to drive up and down the wide beach road in his father’s dark blue hardtop Buick, cranking all the windows down to make the car feel like the convertible his father wouldn’t buy. With no gears to shift and one hand light on the steering wheel, he would run his fingers back through his own severely trained D.A. and undo his shirt to his belt, exposing a narrow but nicely shaped chest. He always gave Daphne the front seat so she could control the radio and she’d find Bill Haley or Brenda Lee or Buddy Holly, turn them up full blast and sing her lungs out, sometimes hang out the window to sing her lungs out.
    Tired of cruising, he’d stop the car on the beach to talk driver to driver to some other guy from school, the girls quiet when this happened, watching, listening, and then he’d pull away and swerve into the shallow waves, leaving long brief arcs of tire tracks behind them in the wet sand.
    He studied with Daphne at the dining-room table, taught her how to write a convincing essay,