Keeper by Mal Peet Read Free Book Online Page A

swiped from school textbooks. Slowly, though, they became more organized: a whole book about trees, another about moths, another about fruits and what ate them. My father stopped calling me ‘the Explorer.’ Now both he and Uncle Feliciano called me ‘Professor.’
    Uncle Feliciano came to the house once or twice a week, in the early evening. We would hear the tapping of his stick and the drag of his twisted leg on the gravel, and then he would appear around the corner of the house and sit down, with difficulty, on the chair next to mine. He would summon his sister, my grandmother, and request a glass of tea. Then he would take out his spectacles, which were held together by sticky tape and twisted paper clips, park them on his nose, and squint at my work. If I had drawn a centipede, he would count the body sections and legs, twice, to make sure I had got them right. He would criticize the colors I had used in drawings of plants. He also enjoyed teaching me the local names of the things I’d drawn.
    ‘This one, this beetle here, we call the Bullfighter. You know why? It has one very good trick to defend itself. There are birds who like to eat him, because he is big and juicy. So when he comes up against one of these birds, he pulls this big blob of red stuff, like blood but more sticky, out of his head with his front legs, and puts it on the ground next to him. For some reason, the bird goes for this red blob, not the beetle. Like a bullfighter using the red cape, you know, to distract the bull? And so the beetle escapes.’
    He’d lick his finger — and I wished he wouldn’t — to turn to the next page.
    ‘Hah! Now, this one has a rude name: Stinkbutt. When he is attacked, he turns around and makes a terrible smell from his back end. If you are unlucky enough to be near him when he does it, you can hear the noise it makes, like a tiny gun:
pap-ap!
’
    On most of Uncle Feliciano’s visits, we were not alone at the table. My mother took great pride in my books and liked to be there when Feliciano looked through them. I always felt a little flood of shame run through me when she praised my work and shared her ambitions for me with another person. But there was one evening I particularly remember, because Uncle Feliciano and I were alone at the rickety table below the bare light bulb. He flicked his dampened finger through my latest pages, but he seemed less interested than usual. He closed the book and looked out at the moon.
    ‘You know why I call you “Professor”?’ he asked.
    ‘You like to tease me, Uncle,’ I said.
    ‘No. I call you Professor to please your mother. To help you with your deceptions.’
    I suddenly felt my insides clench up. I said nothing, hoping for an escape from the conversation. I knew there wouldn’t be one.
    ‘It is unusual,’ he said, ‘for a boy with such big hands to be good at drawing. In your hands, the pencils look like straws in a pig’s fist. Your drawings are surprisingly good, considering this. And it is not just your hands. You have become big in many ways. Your family thinks this is normal. I do not. I remember the conversation we had when we watched the boys play in the plaza. You hid from me then, and you are hiding from me now. Boys do not change as much as you have changed by drawing flowers and insects. You do not get big, strong hands and buffalo shoulders doing that.’
    I swallowed, and said, ‘I cannot help having big hands, Uncle Feliciano. It’s just the way I am.’
    He stared straight ahead of him at nothing in particular. I was a little shocked when he leaned forward and spat into the darkness. He was angry with me because I was being dishonest with him. Or that’s what I thought. So I was very surprised when he stretched out his arm and rested his hand gently on mine and spoke to me in a voice that had nothing but kindness in it.
    ‘I am not upset in any way that there are things you cannot tell me, or things you cannot tell your family,’ he