The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence Read Free Book Online Page A

it. I jerked my hand away as though I had accidentallyset it on a hot stove. He didn’t say a word. He turned and went outside, where Matt was telling the drayman what to do with the black trunk inscribed
Miss H. Currie
.
    I felt I must pursue him, say it was a passing thing and not meant. But I didn’t. I only stood at the stairs’ ending, looking at the big brown-framed picture, a steel engraving of cattle, bearing the legend
The towing herd winds slowly o’er the lea
.
    I did not go out teaching. I stayed and kept my father’s accounts, played hostess for him, chatted diplomatically to guests, did all he expected of me, for I felt (sometimes with rancor, sometimes with despair) that I would reimburse him for what he’d spent, whatever it cost me. But when he brought home young men, to introduce to me, I snubbed the lot of them.
    I’d been back in Manawaka three years when I met Brampton Shipley, quite by chance, for normally I would not have found myself in his company. Chaperoned by Auntie Doll, I was allowed to go to a dance at the school one evening, because the proceeds were to go to the fund for building a hospital in town. Auntie Doll was gabbling away with Floss Drieser, so when Bram asked me to dance, I went with him. The Shipleys all danced well, I’ll give them that. Heavy as Bram was, he was light on his feet.
    We spun around the chalky floor, and I reveled in his fingernails with crescents of ingrown earth that never met a file. I fancied I heard in his laughter the bravery of battalions. I thought he looked a bearded Indian, so brown and beaked a face. The black hair thrusting from his chin was rough as thistles. The next instant, though, I imagined him rigged out in a suit of gray soft as a dove’s breast-feathers.
    Oh, I was the one, all right, tossing my black mane contemptuously, yet never certain the young men had really noticed. I knew my mind, no doubt, but the mind changed every minute, one instant feeling pleased with what I knew and who I was and where I lived, the next instant consigning the brick house to perdition and seeing the plain board town and the shack dwellings beyond our pale as though they’d been the beckoning illustrations in the book of Slavic fairy tales given me by an aunt, the enchanted houses with eyes, walking on their own splayed hen’s feet, the czar’s sons playing at peasants in coarse embroidered tunics, bloused and belted, the ashen girls drowning attractively in meres, crowned always with lilies, never with pigweed or slime.
    Brampton Shipley was fourteen years older than I. He’d come out from the East with his wife Clara some years before, and taken a homestead in the valley just outside town. It was river land, and should have been good, but it hadn’t flourished for him.
    “Lazy as a pet pig,” my father said of him. “No get-up-and-go.”
    I’d seen him sometimes in the store. He was always laughing. God knows why he had cause to laugh, left to bring up two girls alone. His wife had died of a burst spleen, nothing to do with children. I’d spoken no more than hello to her occasionally in the store. A vat of a woman she had been, something moistly fat about her, and around her there always clung a sour yeasty smell as though she spent her life in cleaning churns. She was inarticulate as a stabled beast, and when she mustered voice it had been gruff as a man’s, pebbled with impermissibles, I
seen
and
ain’t
, even worse coming from the woman than from the man, the Lord knows why.
    “Hagar,” Bram Shipley said. “You’re a good dancer, Hagar.”
    As we went spinning like tumbleweed in a Viennese waltz, disguised and hidden by the whirling crowd, quite suddenly he pulled me to him and pressed his outheld groin against my thigh. Not by accident. There was no mistaking it. No one had ever dared in this way before. Outraged, I pushed at his shoulders, and he grinned. I, mortified beyond words, couldn’t look at him except dartingly. But when he