Surfacing by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

she blends and mutes herself so well he may not notice.
    While the stove is heating I go outside, first up to the outhouse and down again to the lake to dip my hands and face, then to the refrigerator, a metal garbage can sunk in the ground with a tight-fitting raccoon-proof lid and over that a heavy wooden cover. When the game wardens arrived in their police launch, as they did once a year, they could never believe we didn’t have an icebox, they used to search everywhere for hidden, illegal fish.
    I reach down for the eggs; the bacon is in a screened box under the cabin, ventilated but protected from flies and mice. In a settler’s house these would have been rootcellar and smoke-house; my father is an improvisor on standard themes.
    I carry the food inside and start the breakfast. Joe and David are up, Joe sitting on the wall bench, face still fuzzy with sleep, David examining his chin in the mirror.
    “I can make you hot water if you want to shave,” I suggest, but his reflection grins and he shakes his head.
    “Naaa,” he says, “I’m gonna grow me a little old beard.”
    “Don’t you dare,” Anna says. “I don’t like him kissing me when he has a beard, it reminds me of a cunt.” Her hand goes over her mouth as though she is shocked. “Isn’t that awful?”
    “Filthy talk, woman,” David says, “she’s uncultured and vulgar.”
    “Oh I know, I’ve always been like that.”
    It’s a quick skit, Joe and I are the audience, but Joe is still off in the place inside himself where he spends most of his time and I’m at the stove turning the bacon, I can’t watch them so they stop.
    I crouch down in front of the stove and open the firebox door to make the toast over the coals. There are no dirty words any more, they’ve been neutered, now they’re only parts of speech; but I recall the feeling, puzzled, baffled, when I found out some words were dirty and the rest were clean. The bad ones in French are the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God. You could also say Jeesus Christ, but it meant you were angry or disgusted. I learned about religion the way most children then learned about sex, not in the gutter but in the gravel and cement schoolyard, during the winter months of real school. They would cluster in groups, holding each others’ mittened hands and whispering. They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn’t believe me but I believed them.
    I finish the toast; the bacon is done too, I dish it out, pouring the fat afterwards into the fire, keeping my hand back from the spurt of flame.
    After breakfast David says “What’s on the agenda?” I tell them I would like to search the trail that runs for half a mile close to the shore; my father may have gone along it to get wood. There was another trail that went back almost as far as the swamp but it was my brother’s and secret, by now it must be illegible.
    He can’t have left the island, both canoes are in the toolshed and the aluminum motorboat is padlocked to a tree near the dock; the gas tanks for the motor are empty.
    “Anyway,” I say, “there’s only two places he can be, on the island or in the lake.” My head contradicts me: someone could have picked him up here and taken him to the village at the other end of the lake, it would be the perfect way to vanish; maybe he wasn’t here during the winter at all.
    But that’s avoiding, it’s not unusual for a man to disappear in the bush, it happens dozens of times each year. All it takes is a small mistake, going too far from the house in winter, blizzards are sudden, or twisting your leg so you can’t walk out, in spring the blackflies would finish you, they crawl inside your