Love and Sleep by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page B

uncle.
    "Shut that off, will you, Pierce."
    Sam Oliphant possessed within his household an unquestionable kind of authority that he did not ponder, not how he came by it nor whether he should exercise it. He was subject to infrequent bitter moods, which he thought he had a right to; he could be rageful sometimes and easily exasperated, as though unable to reconcile himself to the fact that after the disaster that had befallen him, and after the efforts he had made not to be crushed by it, he should still be subject to the daily irritations and dissatisfactions of physical life. The rest of the family tried to make up for it, and Sam got his way and his comforts around the house without difficulty most of the time. But still he thought of himself as good-natured and forthcoming, on the whole, and it would have grieved him to know that his nephew found it impossible to remain alone in the same room with him for more than a few minutes.
    Pierce found the funnies at his uncle's feet and stretched out on the floor with them. Sam shook the sheets of the front section. Pierce squirmed uncomfortably, flipped the colored pages. Peter Pain (a cucumber-green demon not in the Dictionary ) bound a sufferer's head with iron bands, pounded plugs into his nostrils: rout him with Ben-Gay. Sam glanced at Pierce over the tops of his glasses.
    Pierce rose; sighed; felt Sam's look but did not return it; and without offensive haste, as though he had nothing particular to do elsewhere but no real interest in staying in this room either, he left.
    It had grown colder; beyond the window that Hildy looked out of, and the one Pierce looked out of, wind was snatching colored leaves from the trees, reminding Hildy of calendar pages rapidly blown away in a movie scene. Upstairs in the big house, Winnie sought in the closets for the store of schoolbooks she had sent away for months before, standard texts for the children's grades this year, which she had hidden so that the kids wouldn't have read them all before school started.
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    Four
    Sister Mary Philomel's guardian angel awoke her before dawn, as she had asked it specially to do: her eyes opened at 4:24 (according to the luminous hands of the minute wristwatch propped on her bedside table, a gift from her father on the occasion of her final vows). She lay unmoving on the narrow bed and silently spoke the Magnificat. She would have got up to kneel, but she wanted not to disturb the sisters beyond the white curtains on either side of her, nurses who needed every second of the sleep they got.
    When the dormitory began to bustle and the curtains first on this side then on that to move slightly with the movements of the sisters beyond, Sister Mary Philomel got up, and knelt on the tile floor (so much colder somehow than the wooden floors of the convent in Washington) to ask for help and strength and wisdom in the new task to which she had been called. And she did feel something like strength flow into her, like the light growing stronger in the window beyond her bed.
    She found when she went to sit on the toilet that her menstrual flow had ceased, which was gratifying; she could take a shower today, as she had been unable to do for the previous days, and cleanse cleanse cleanse. The dank shower stall even felt less penitential than usual today, though the water smelled, as always, faintly sulfurous; completely natural, Sisters, mountain springs, said Sister Mary Eglantine, but it wasn't Sister Mary Philomel alone who thought of pollution, mine tailings, the coal cars that passed endlessly along the tracks beyond the hospital grounds.
    While she dressed—with special care this morning—she repeated the Magnificat. My soul magnifies the Lord. She thought of the long way up to the Hazelton house on the hill. She had not yet been able to find the materials, the little workbooks and readers and flashcards and teacher's guides, that she had used in Washington when she had