Blackstrap Hawco Read Online Free PDF Page B

him from her doorstep and, with trembling hand, offer him a peppermint knob from a dish, dipping her chin and grinning at the clump of pink and white that needed to be pried apart. ‘’Av anudder,’ she’d say. ‘One fer yer mowt ’n one fer yer pocket.’
    Dead old woman in a box. Gone. That’s where she went when it was over, in a box, then into the ground. There would be a service, and all the children would have to go. No more peppermint knobs. No more porcelain dolls laid out on her doorstep to please and entice the Bareneed girls. Say a prayer for the soul of Old Missus Critch. Now, she’s gone, the horrible witch. He’d imagined a girl skipping and singing that song.
    It was Sunday after supper when Junior was in his room with his book of animals. He was thinking about the box and Old Missus Critch, the remembered taste of peppermint knobs in his mouth, while he tried reading about what a moose ate. He had just shifted his eyes over to the picture of a red fox when he heard his mother’s cry. A startling sound he had never heard before. It was as though she were surprised and afraid at once, but slightly excited too. The moment after the sound, his mother called out to him. ‘Junior.’
    He was already on his feet and moving toward her room where she was standing by the bed staring down at the floor. A huge spill of water was darkly spread out over the wood. Junior looked to the jug on his mother’s washstand. It was upright.
    â€˜Go get Missus Murphy.’ Her voice was cut with concern. ‘The baby.’
    Junior did not know if he should be scared, but he was. Something was the matter with his mother, something like sudden sickness. At first, he hesitated, thinking that he or Uncle Ace might be able to help. He thought of his uncle, but knew that he hadn’t been in the house for ages. Where is Uncle Ace? he now wondered. Where has he gone?
    â€˜Go,’ said his mother, sweeping her long black hair back out of her face and looking at him, her forehead wrinkling. ‘Hurry.’
    He ran down over the stairs, his palm skimming the banister rail, took a turn and headed to the kitchen at the back of the house. In the back porch, he pulled on his boots but forgot his coat as he bolted outinto the winter, the lash of the wind stinging his cheeks and hands, the snow gusting into his hair and caking there as he ran uphill toward the Murphy house. Looking back, already out of breath, he saw that he had not shut the door, light spilling out onto the snow, and spreading, then retracting as the door was violently pulled shut by the wind.
    He passed the Critch house and saw the lamp on in the parlour, shadows moving behind there. Black and stretching tall and wide. Old Missus Critch rising up out of her box to chase after him through the blinding snow, wanting to tell him something the way she had always seemed to want to, after she gave him the peppermint knobs, her eyes watching his face in a sad strange way that spooked him. Even worse now that she was dead and after him, rising up from her sleep, the dish of peppermint knobs rattling in her hand as she bound across the snow to chew on his ankles.
    He was clear of the Critch house, then passed the Coveyducks’, a lamp burning in the kitchen window at the back, the stream of smoke pouring from the chimney bent and swept along by the hardness of the wind.
    When he arrived at the Murphy house, he was completely out of breath and banging on the door in such a fit that Missus Murphy, Paddy’s grandmother, not Paddy’s mother, for Paddy’s mother had perished in childbirth, answered with a look of alarm on her wrinkled face that might have been the exact face of Missus Critch in the dim light.
    Stumbling back, Junior tried to speak, but could not squeak a word out. He struggled to swallow. ‘It’s Mom. Something the matter.’ He glanced back over his shoulder, fearing for his