Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani Read Free Book Online Page B

with life, take me out to the back forty and shoot me.” Which made the adults laugh, while Ally and I and our four cousins looked on and wondered. Grand Dan wasn’t exactly stern, but she didn’t laugh that often. When she did, the laugh came out quietly, as if it had been locked inside the soft part of her chin.
    That was the day I learned to tie my shoelaces. To everyone’s shame but my own, I had resisted learning. Grand Dan sat me on a kitchen chair outside the back door and told me I was to stay there. My cousins ran off to play in Mott’s field without me. My fingers fumbled, my thumbs got in the way. Grand Dan demonstrated twice and said, “You may get off that chair, Miss, when you can make a bow that won’t come undone. You’re a big girl now, and you have to learn and that’s all there is to it.”
    I struggled; I fought off tears of frustration. Ally came outside and sat on the step nearby, for support. The screen door opened and out came Uncle Fred, carrying another kitchen chair. He had huge ears but he laughed about them and told us that Herr Gott had provided him with big ears so that he could hear the voices of his four sons, no matter how far they wandered. Gott was our uncle’s name for God, and he pronounced it like a truncated version of goat. He added the Herr , he said, because it attracted God’s attention.
    Uncle Fred pretended not to be able to tell Ally and me apart, and maybe he really couldn’t. When he called out “Girl,” we both looked up. Maybe, being the father of four sons, heliked to say the word girl. It didn’t matter, because Ally and I forgave him the denial of our individuality. He did not, after all, hold our heads under the pump. And we loved his stories.
    After he’d set his chair beside mine, he put a cigarette between his lips and struck a match against the chair-bottom, whipping the flame out from under his seat. A breeze puffed out the flame. He lit another and that, too, went out. Each blown match increased his craving, but he finally gave up.
    “Do you see that, Girl? Herr Gott is sending me a message,” he said, and pointed to the sky. “He knows that I’m trying to give up smoking.” He tucked the unlit cigarette behind one big ear. “Keep tying your bow while I talk,” he said. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
    I propped my feet on the rung of the chair, I swung them back and forth, I leaned forward over my shoe and tied a bow, first try.
    I’ve never forgotten the pleasure, the sense of triumph. I did not shout, or run to the house to show Grand Dan, or get up off the chair, which I was now permitted to leave. Instead, I tucked my feet under me and waited.
    Uncle Fred grinned. “Aha! You see, Girl, you could do it all along.” He looked at Ally and me as if we were conspirators, and began.
    “When I was eight years old, not much older than you are now, I travelled on foot with my father to a town on the banks of the Salzach—a crisp, cold river in the old country. So beautiful, you could not imagine.” He swept his hands through the air, to show the beauty in his mind’s eye. “Salt was shipped down the river before the railway was built. My mother gave me bread and cheese and sausage— Wurst —to carry for our lunch. When we reached the town, it was night and rain wasfalling, and my father found a room at an inn. The place was gloomy, but there was one room left, a corner room, upstairs.
    “The bed was narrow, but we both fit in and pulled an eiderdown—a feather blanket—over us. I was tired, and fell asleep at once. My father told me later that he was still awake when he heard a loud thump behind the bed. The thump woke me, and my father whispered, ‘Stay quiet. Listen.’ So we lay on our backs under the eiderdown and the noise started again, one big thump and then another. There was nothing behind us, no window, no shutter, no place for anyone to hide. My father got up to look under the bed but it was built on a platform of