A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray Read Free Book Online

even told her so a few weeks ago when Dad was out—probably helping someone—and Brother Campbell and one of the missionaries popped round to deliver the Home Teaching message and check whether everyone was saying their prayers and reading their scriptures.
    After Brother Campbell had finished lecturing them all, he said, “Would you like to assign someone to say a prayer, Alma?”
    “I’ll choose someone,” Mum offered.
    Brother Campbell shook his head. “The priesthood is like an umbrella, Sister Bradley. The men hold it and the women are protected by it. Alma should assign the prayer. He’s the man of the house when the Bishop isn’t here.”
    “I’m the adult when Ian isn’t here,” Mum said, and then she laughed. “Hang on, I’m also an adult when Ian
is
here! Anyway, I’m happy to ask someone to say the prayer.”
    “But you’d like to fulfill your responsibilities as a priesthood holder, wouldn’t you, Alma?”
    Al didn’t care about his responsibilities, he just wanted Brother Campbell to shut up and stop treating Mum like an idiot. “Who did you want to say it, Mum?”
    “I was going to ask Brother Campbell,” she said.
    “Brother Campbell, would you say the closing prayer, please?” Al asked.
    Brother Campbell was totally owned! He had no choice but to say the prayer. And afterward, when the Home Teachers had gone, Al followed Mum into the kitchen.
    “I’m on your side,” he said, half expecting her to thank him. She lifted the dishes out of the dish drainer and into the cupboard. The plates scraped each other as she forced them into a stack. When she’d finished she turned round and said, “Alma, there aren’t any
sides
in this family.”
    Al strokes the bump of money through his pocket.
    Borrowing, that’s what he’s doing. He heads back to his room and
Bad Guys of the Book of Mormon
, the worst of whom happens to be his namesake.
    I SSY IS LYING in a cold bath of bone hurt.
    She wants Mum.
    There is music—
“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, dear Jacob”
—but it is far away, like underwater singing.
    There were four candles on her last birthday cake. She blew them all out at once and Mum said, “Make a wish, Issy.”
    She wishes now, for Mum to come. Where is Mum?

– 5 –
Happy Is the Man That Hath His Quiver Full
    Ian sings along to a Tabernacle Choir CD as he drives home from Liverpool.
“Though deep’ning trials throng your way, Press on, press on, ye Saints of God!”
His voice is loud and quite tuneful. He likes to pretend the Tabernacle Choir is accompanying him as he keeps his own time and adds extra vibrato to the longer notes like a soloist.
    Driving along the dock road makes him feel small, an insignificant speck of humanity alongside the looming structures and machinery of industry. He passes the empty, crumbling acropolis of the tobacco warehouse, Goliathan container cranes, and industrial buildings. The railway line, a fire station, car dealerships, and a Chinese supermarket graze his peripheral vision, but the arc of his imagination is occupied by the docks. By soot-streaked red bricks, the crisscross of colored and corrugated metals, iron railings, concrete, and occasional snapshot slices of ships.
    Ian is a pioneer. He drives a Toyota Estima, but if the situation arose he knows he would be equally at home with a covered wagon, or even a handcart. Brother Rimmer’s got a handcart in his garage. He constructed it in the seventies in preparation for the trek to Zion, back when people still talked about fleeing to Jackson County, Missouri, and it seemed like the Second Coming was just around the corner; before the Brethren told everyone to stay put and build Zion in their own communities. When Ian was a small boy, Brother Rimmer used to pull his handcart to church activities and give thechildren rides around the parking lot while they sang pioneer songs
—“Westward ho, Westward ho
!”—and pretended to shoot Indians. The pleasure of this memory