A Hard Witching Read Online Free PDF

Cherry gets here.”
    “Saskatoons?” I said doubtfully, considering their sweet dirt taste, their gravelly bodies, the colour of a bruise. They weren’t much of an offering. “Don’t they have saskatoons,” I asked, “in Thunder Bay?”
    “So,” she said, “pick them anyway. It’s a nice thought.” She went to the kitchen and rinsed out an old ice cream pail she’d been using for vegetable peelings. Max and I stood behind her, waiting for the pail, and I realized that a significant portion of the time we spent at our grandparents’ was devoted to picking things: tomatoes and rhubarb and lettuce from the garden (the carrots, radishes and beets were all off-limits, as Max broke the stems, leaving the vegetables to rot in the earth); saskatoons and chokecherries out at the Sand Hills for jelly; mint and chamomile from the patch in back for the detested tea, which, along with raw garlic and nutmeg, was used to treat all the minor ailments that we didn’t have the good sense to hide.
    It had attained ritual proportions for us, this harvesting, our methods guided by our grandfather’s counsel: always work left to right, so you don’t miss anything; never pull, always pinch; pick with your right, hold (the bucket, the branch, the plant) with your left. Most important, pick early in the day, before the heat has sucked out all the night dew. We generally remained faithful to these rules, even if Grandpa wasn’t around. Often we ate as we worked (there was no rule against this) and made up little songs that we thought terribly funny, punning tunes we’d heard on the radio:
Pardon me, boooy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoooes?
to “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or
Don’t ever leee-eave your pi-zza burning
to “Beast of Burden” (though Max always wanted to sing to “Convoy,” which was impossible).
    But this morning we did not sing. We trailed out to the saskatoon bushes west of the garage, me walking ahead with the ice cream pail, Max scuffing a few feet behind. We did notsing, nor did we eat as we picked. We kept our backs to each other, the pail on the ground between us. In the past few days, Max had seemed somehow different, less silly and less anxious, older perhaps. But there was something else, a sort of reserved hostility I’d never noticed about him before. Timed as it was, this change seemed to be connected to Uncle Aloetius’ death, though I didn’t see how that was possible. Uncle Aloetius hadn’t really meant much to either of us. He was just an old man. Worse, he was Uncle Aloetius. And he was dead. That Max might be grieving seemed absurd to me, and I wondered if this change was just a show, a way of getting attention. I worried, too, about what he would say to Aunt Cherry. Would he tell her about our play-acting, about
my
play-acting? Would he make some stupid, hurtful joke as he’d done the previous day with Grandma?
    I cut a look at him from the corner of my eye. He was picking slowly, dropping each berry into the pail before reaching for another.
    “You shouldn’t have said that to Grandma,” I began after a moment. “That was a dumb thing to say.”
    I kept picking, waiting for him to respond. When he didn’t, I turned around. He was crouched down, with his back to me.
    “Max,” I said, “I’m talking to you.”
    But he just shifted slightly on his haunches. I wanted desperately to know what he was staring at, but I turned back to my picking anyway. For a while, there was only the
plunk
and roll of my berries hitting the bottom of the ice cream pail. Finally, I turned to him. We were both dressed in our next-to-best clothes, had been warned against staining them or snagging them on the branches. For a second, I thought of shoving him, right between his narrow shoulder blades, into the bushes. I wished him there, caught in those branches, scraped and struggling.Instead, in spite of myself, I walked up to him and peeked over his shoulder. In the palm of his hand he held one