The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan Read Free Book Online Page B

by a snake when she was carrying him, and she asked my mother if that was true. My mother looked even sadder, and she told Rachel that a mother and the child she carries are one flesh, that things can’t help but be passed on.
    Once outside the house I forgot my tiredness, forgot the strange, long night. The trees were standing still, red and orange against a clear blue sky, and though the air was cool on my cheeks, the sun was bright. Outside his store Mr. Allen was polishing apples on a little table and I thought of a pie my mother could make, thought of how one of those red apples would taste if I picked it up and bit into it. I thought that later I might take my walk by the river, instead of around and around the yard, and that thought carried me across the road to raise the knocker on the faded blue door, and I didn’t even worry that it might be Mrs. Barnes who opened it, that I might have to look at her baffled gray eyes, repeat my sentence again and again
.
    Reverend Toller said there was evil about, in the shape of people who said they could talk to the dead. People who said that the dead appeared and rapped and spoke through them. Reverend Toller said that a woman in this very congregation had held such a gathering, invited such a person into her home. I wondered if my mother would have gone, if she’d known.
    My mother’s hands are cracked and sore and her hip aches, especially in rainy weather. She tells my father that she will make calls, join committees, but not just yet. I wonder that he doesn’t know, what she can and cannot do. She goes to the shops in town, and if she will have a lot to carry, I go with her. People know her name, talk to her about the weather or the latest news. She smiles her sad smile and answers them, agrees about the sun or the clouds,
tsks
at the sad fate of Mrs. Toller. She is different in the shops, not completely, but a little. In her black dress, in her bonnet.
    Our real life is in the house; it is only in the house that she hums sometimes, or sings a bit of one of my father’s songs, or a hymn from church. In a house with five rooms there is always something to do, but sometimes she cuts a slice from a loaf that’s just baked and we sit on the back step and tilt our faces to the sun. We are as close as thought, and even if she doesn’t know the details of all my secrets, she knows their shape. Days I stay in bed I hear her footsteps moving through the house, climbing the stairs, and she strokes my forehead and whispers that she will take care of me always. We were one flesh, when she carried me.
    My mother never asks about the children but there is a waiting in her shoulders, the way she bows her head, that eases when I tell her things. Sometimes, in an evil way, I fold my lips and say nothing; I don’t know why. But not often. I watch her bend to the stove, watch her straighten up and rub at her sore hip, and everything lightens when I start to speak. She sinks into the chair across from me, the towel still in her hand, her eyes on my face. So many years we have done this, my hair growing longer, my mother’s turning gray, but the children always the same.
    It was Miss Alice who opened the door, as neat and gentle as always, and she had me come in while she searched out the music. The hallway was dark after the blue day but I saw a flicker of white, maybe the laughing girl flitting in and out of rooms. Through an open doorway on my left side I saw the pupils at the long school table, heads bent over their work. I
saw Rachel’s bent head, the parting I had made in her hair that morning, and then she looked up and smiled at me, we smiled at each other
.
    Years ago my mother told Mr. Envers that I was very good with a needle, and some days that is true. Other days my mind is a jumble and even her voice comes to me from far away. After the terrible days in Toronto my father brought my mother a posy of white flowers, and she put them in the mug with the picture of the woman