The Birth House by Ami McKay Read Free Book Online Page A

snuck off to Lady’s Cove after school. The tide was just going out, the rocks were filled with pools of warm seawater, and a long strip of clay lay glistening at the edge of the shore. In the shelter of the cove, we did as we always had done: we stripped off our clothes and began throwing wet, heavy balls of mud and clay at each other. We must have been quite a sight, laughing and screaming, our bodies streaked with sloppy trails of brown and grey, but my name was the only name Father called out when he found us. It was a slow, angry insisting, Dora Marie Rare. I pulled my clothes over my dirty, crusty skin and he pulled me by my arm all the way home. I shouldn’t have argued with him, but it didn’t seem fair that I should be singled out. After all, it was Borden’s idea to go to the cove, it was Albert’s idea to wade in the water, it was Charlie who threw the first mud ball. Father didn’t care. He turned, took both my arms and shook me as he spoke. “I never want to see you behaving like that again.”
    “But, Father, I—”
    “Don’t make me cut an alder and take it to your skin, Dora.”
    When we got to the house, Mother greeted us on the porch, looking concerned. She must have spotted us coming up the road and seen from Father’s stride that he was angry. He ordered me to pump a bucket of water from the well. “Get yourself cleaned up before supper, and I’d better not find a speck of clay behind your ears.” When I came back into the house, I heard him complaining to Mother. “She’s too old to fall in with the boys, and she’s gotten some smart with her mouth too. Talk to her, Lottie, tell her she’ll never get a husband if she keeps it up. No man around here wants a wife who talks back.”
    He acted as if it made him sick just to look at me. He shook me so hard he put his fears right into my body. He let go of every nasty thought, every father’s nightmare, and put them in my head—the desire to watch animals mate in the spring, the thoughts of wanting to be touched, the need for men to notice me. I couldn’t have stayed innocent, even if I’d wanted to. I guess he finally realized that there’s no way to stop a girl from becoming a woman.
    At least I’m not as far gone as Grace Hutner. She has a way of speaking, putting her finger to her chin and rolling her eyes while she giggles…it’s as sly as any county-fair magician or snake oil salesman. There’s always a slight dip to the front of her blouse and an impatient turn to her ankle as she sticks her leg out to the side of her desk or into the aisle of the sanctuary at church. The lightness of her hair and the blue of her eyes fool most everyone into thinking she’s perfection walking. Her one-dimpled smile pulls everyone into her path, boys, girls, men. They fall right to her side: “Do you need help carrying those books, Grace?” “Tell us about your new dress, Grace.” “A young thing like you shouldn’t walk alone.” Every churchgoing boy in the Bay, including both Albert and Borden, has rolled her in the hayloft. The only time I’ve ever seen the two of them come to blows was over her. She had them each believing her heart belonged to him. Even though they made peace and forgave each other when she took up with Archer Bigelow, she can still get them to argue over which one of them gets to walk her home from church. All the boys want her, and every little girl wants to be her. Grace Hutner could make a man want to go blind, just so he could better hear her lies.

    I’ve “borrowed” a few books from a dusty, forgotten cupboard at the schoolhouse, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen among them. Miss B. lets me keep them at her cabin as long as I read them aloud to her while she makes clay pipes with her willy-nilly fingers. She teases me, holding my wrist before and after each reading, counting my heartbeats. “Your heart’s not changed a flit, your skin’s not hot…you sure you’re alright?” We have formed a reading