Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

walked as far as the cemetery: one needs a goal for these otherwise witless excursions. I wore my broad-brimmed straw hat to cut the glare, and my tinted glasses, and took my cane to feel for the curbs. Also a plastic shopping bag.
    I went along Erie Street, past a drycleaner’s, a portrait photographer’s, the few other main-street stores that have managed to survive the drainage caused by the malls on the edge of town. Then Betty’s Luncheonette, which is under new ownership again: sooner or later its proprietors get fed up, or die, or move to Florida. Betty’s now has a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it’s in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they’ve had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights.I don’t need that fluff on my coffee. Looks like shaving cream. One swallow and you’re foaming at the mouth.
    Chicken pot pies were the specialty once, but they’re long gone. There are hamburgers, but Myra says to avoid them. She says they use pre-frozen patties made of meat dust. Meat dust, she says, is what is scraped up off the floor after they’ve cut up frozen cows with an electric saw. She reads a lot of magazines, at the hairdresser’s.
    The cemetery has a wrought-iron gate, with an intricate scrollwork archway over it, and an inscription:Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I Will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me. Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; butThou is a slippery character. EveryThou I’ve known has had a way of going missing. They skip town, or turn perfidious, or else they drop like flies, and then where are you?
    Right about here.
    The Chase family monument is hard to miss: it’s taller than everything else. There are two angels, white marble, Victorian, sentimental but quite well done as such things go, on a large stone cube with scrolled corners. The first angel is standing, her head bowed to the side in an attitude of mourning, one hand placed tenderly on the shoulder of the second one. The second kneels, leaning against the other’s thigh, gazing straight ahead, cradling a sheaf of lilies. Their bodies are decorous, the contours shrouded in folds of softly draped, impenetrable mineral, but you can tell they’re female. Acid rain is taking its toll of them: their once-keen eyes are blurred now, softened and porous, as if they have cataracts. But perhaps that’s my own vision going.
    Laura and I used to visit here. We were brought by Reenie, who thought the visiting of family graves was somehow good for children, and later we came by ourselves: it was a pious and therefore acceptable excuse for escape. When she was little, Laura used to say the angels were meant to be us, the two of us. I told her this couldn’t be true, because the angels were put there by our grandmother before we were born. But Laura never paid much attention to that kind of reasoning. She was more interested in forms—in what things were in themselves, not what they weren’t. She wanted essences.
    Over the years I’ve made a practice of coming here at least twice a year, to tidy up, if for no other reason. Once I drove, but no longer: my eyes are too bad for that. I bent over painfully and gathered up the withered flowers that had accumulated there, left by Laura’s anonymous admirers, and stuffed them into my plastic shopping bag. There are fewer of these tributes than there used to be, though still more than enough. Today some were quite fresh. Once in a while I’ve found sticks of incense, and candles too, as if Laura were being invoked.
    After I’d dealt with the bouquets I walked around the monument, reading through the roll call of defunct Chases engraved on the sides of the cube.Benjamin Chase and his Beloved Wife Adelia; Norval Chase