The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman Read Free Book Online Page B

gets stuck in his throat and turns into a cough. “There,” he says, pummeling his chest with his fist until he’s surrounded by an aura of putty dust, “there’s your example for you, Robbie boy, wear your mask while working with this stuff if you don’t want to end up a broken-down old man like me.”
    “You look pretty good, Mr. McKay, for a man your age.”
    “Mebbe for a hundred-year-old man,” Dad grumbles, turning back on his ladder. I can tell he’s pleased, though. He’s vain about his appearance, my sixty-year-old dad, about his full head of hair that’s still more black than gray—at least when it’s not covered with putty dust—his good teeth and his arm and chest muscles still strong from a lifetime of lifting and installing heavy plate-glass windows. I only wish he’d take as much care of his insides as he does his outer appearance: he still isn’t wearing the mask. “Which is how old I feel when someone calls me Mr. McKay. Call me Gil, son.”
    “Okay, Gil,” Robbie replies, “did you really know Augustus Penrose?”
    “Sure did. Now there was a man old as Methuselah. He was already in his eighties when I started cutting glass in his studio, but he still put in a full day of work. If he didn’t like how you were doing something he’d take the cutter right out of your hand and do it himself. Going on ninety and his hands were steady as bedrock. Cool, too. He could stand next to a twenty-five-hundred-degree furnace and not break a sweat. Man had ice water in his veins.…”
    “Robbie, maybe you ought to go outside and help Ernesto—” I start to suggest, anxious over what colorful Gus Penrose story my father might launch into, but Ernesto comes in through the side door at just that moment to tell us that he’s managed to free all the exterior putty in the time it’s taken the three of us to scrape out the interior putty. He’s already got the wirecutters in his hand and is ready to cut the tie wires from the saddle bars supporting the window. I hold up my hand with five fingers splayed. “Give us five minutes,” I tell him.
    “Are we clear?” I ask my father and Robbie. Dad runs his chisel around the top and right-hand side of the window, Robbie checks the left-hand side and I swipe the shallow bottom groove with my gloved hand. All clear. I give Ernesto the thumbs up and he proceeds to cut the tie wires. The window shivers slightly with each cut and I look up at the Lady’s face to check for any panes coming loose. That would be the hardest glass to replace—the finely painted portrait of Eugenie—or is it, as Christine suggested in her lecture yesterday, Eugenie’s sister, Clare?
The mad sister
. For the first time today I look at the window not as a set of technical problems—of cracks and deteriorating lead came, bowing and crizzling—but as a portrait. The Lady’s yellow hair spills over her shoulders more wildly than I recalled. Her left hand grasps a hank of the abundant tresses almost as if she were pulling her own hair. I’ve never noticed how firm that grip looks and now—with the window shaking in its setting—I have the impression that she’s trying to clutch onto something. She does look a bit mad—or at least desperate.
    When the wires are all cut we all prepare to slide the window into the deeper slot on the right side. She sticks at first, then makes a grating sound like a soft moan which, when the glass clears the left groove andErnesto carefully tilts the window into the room and we lift her out of her stone setting, turns into a long sigh as a gust of warm air snakes in under her robes. I almost imagine that I hear her skirts rustling—and then I see that it’s just some old newspaper that must have been stuffed in the grooves and sealed in the putty fluttering down to the floor. I let out my own breath as the three men lay her down gently on a plywood pallet and stoop to gather the shredded paper.
    “We’ll clean that up,” my dad says.