A Wild Swan Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t bicker. They don’t get snappish over minor domestic failings. These quarters cramped and damp, this road rendered impassible by mud more than half the year, strike them as inevitable, and they console themselves with vague references to how it could have been worse (although it’s difficult to say what “worse” might entail). There is no hint among them of Why did I let you bring me here? or When will you die, so I can escape?
    The visitor who arrives one mucky night is not a stranger; or not exactly a stranger, though he is in fact strange. He’s an old friend of Mr. White’s, a man who, when young, was prone (more so than Mr. White) to wild and defiant inclinations. In the way of certain trouble-prone boys, he eventually joined the army. He’s been away on military errands for more than two decades, most recently in India. He’s spent the last twenty years helmeted, taciturn, a defender of the Empire, in realms of superstition, of blessings and curses, of darkly magical acts that are usually faked but can seem, on occasion, to be not exactly genuine, but … other than counterfeit, as well.
    The visitor brings with him a gift, the severed paw of a monkey, which he claims has the power to grant three wishes.
    The Whites are unsure about how to receive this particular present. They could use three wishes—a single wish would be riches beyond calculation. But, really. This gruesome, withered little thing, its dead, brown-black fingers curled into themselves? It would seem that Mr. White’s old friend has lost his mind, which is not unusual among men who’ve been long in strange and remote places.
    Still, it’d be impolite to refuse it. Right?
    Mr. White takes the paw into his own hand, and is astonished and appalled when it convulses, ever so slightly, upon contact with the flesh of his own palm.
    Before he can cry out, though, the visitor has snatched it back. He says, in an unsteady voice, that he was about to commit a crime. He’s been unable to rid himself of the paw, he’d thought he could free himself by giving it to a poor, innocent family …
    The Whites just stare at him. What is there to say?
    The visitor tells them he bemoans the day he ever laid tired eyes on the monkey’s paw.
    With a spasm of lunatic resolve, he throws it into the fireplace.
    Mr. White just as quickly retrieves it, singeing his own fingertips. He’s embarrassed for his friend. He assures him that a gift is a gift. He says he’s always been drawn to exotica, and there’s not much of that in this neighborhood.
    The visitor, looking gaunt and terrified as a muskrat in a trap, stumbles to the door. Before taking his leave, he warns the Whites not to wish on the paw, and implores them, should they find themselves wish-prone, to restrict their requests to the most sensible possible desires.
    Then he’s out the door. The rain absorbs him back into the night.
    Mother and son are quick to render their verdict. They break out in gusts of laughter.
    Sensible wishes? Please send us a new dustpan? Grant us, if you will, fewer roaches in the larder?
    Mr. White remains silent. He closes the door, through which rain is blowing like a swarm of hornets.
    He could swear he felt the paw clench when it was given to him. He’s holding it again, though, and it’s inert as death itself.
    Mr. White can manage only a muted protest on the poor man’s behalf. “He’s been harmed by too much strangeness, you didn’t know us when we were boys…”
    Mrs. White snatches the paw from him, mutters an invented incantation, and says, “I wish…”
    She pauses. She claims she has nothing to wish for (she who washes dishes in an old iron pot, who does her best to coax fires out of soggy logs).
    â€œI wish for two hundred pounds,” she says eventually, two hundred pounds being the sum still owed on the cottage. With two hundred pounds,