Fall on Your Knees by Ann-marie MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

never raise her.”
    Mrs MacIsaac watched the shop while Mr MacIsaac limped back to his greenhouse for a drop of “the good spirit”. He’d been in the Boer War.
    At home, Materia stood at the counter rolling out dough for a pie — steak and kidney like James’s mother used to make — and finally twigged to a thing that had been nagging her all along. It was this: Kathleen’s baptism hadn’t taken. It had been done by a Prostestant minister. The child needed to be properly baptized, in Latin, by a Catholic priest. And then everything would be all right. She told James when he arrived home with the girl but he said, “Kathleen has been baptized. It was done by a man of the cloth, a Christian man, and that’s all there is to it.”
    Kathleen’s cheeks bulged with hard candy, her green gaze directed up at her mother. She didn’t look all that baptized to Materia.
    James had taught his daughter to read words soon after she learned to read music. At three and a half she’d shared his lap with a terrifyingly illustrated book more than half her size and sounded out, “‘In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray….’” He’d started her on Latin when she was five, teaching himself at the same time — it would help with her Italian singing. He ordered another box of books. Children’s classics this time, and they read them aloud, taking turns.
    He hadn’t much time for his own reading, though his books now numbered twenty-three not counting the Encyclopaedia Britannica — “Read that end to end,” thought James, as he gazed at his glass cabinet, “and you’d know just about everything. Go anywhere at all.”
    At the local schoolhouse Kathleen learned to sit in rows and not to gawk at those less fortunate, but little else. The lady teacher got the creeps from the porcelain girl with the mermaid eyes. The child seemed to be in disguise. Staring up at a corner of the ceiling or out the window, waiting for something, a sign — what? — yet always ready with the answer: “Wolfe died on the Plains of Abraham, miss.” Hands folded on the desk, spine straight. “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides, miss.” Every feature formed to preternatural perfection. “It’s i before e except after c, miss.” It wasn’t right in a child. Perhaps she wasn’t a child at all.
    In the schoolyard Kathleen came alive but in the oddest way, showing an alarming tendency to play with boys. Hurling sootballs, schoolbag raised as a shield, shrieking with joy in her linen sailor dress, ringlets flying, for ever banishing herself from the society of girls.
    Blackened knees and torn silk were the stuff of high spirits, and James never scolded her for ruining her clothes, but when Kathleen came home and said, “Pius MacGillicuddy gots a finger in a jar what his da found in the mine, that he b’ought up from a wee tiny sprout,” it was time to send her to Holy Angels in Sydney.
    The Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame were in the business of educating the whole girl: from grammar to botany, physics to French. But above all, Holy Angels offered an excellent music program. James had been going to wait a few years, till Kathleen turned twelve and he’d saved enough for tuition, but there was no help for it, she’d be tarnished by then. He’d find the money.
    He started a garden in the backyard on the far side of the creek. He bought a new old horse and cart. He travelled across the island to the Margaree and collected topsoil with no trace of coal-dust. The missus would have to learn to make soap, butter and her own clothes. From now on they’d have to pay only for meat, and Benny always gave them a special price. Benny gave James a special price on manure too.
    “For you, free. That’s kosher cow shit, mind you, you’re going to have kosher carrots and potatoes, you’ll be a Jew in no time — you want, I’ll throw in a circumcision, no