Candlemoth Read Online Free PDF Page A

go
put that in her mailbox.'
        I
would look back months, years, decades even, and still see the way his face
looked, and how it sounded, and remember as if it were yesterday the way we
laughed until we flip-flopped on the rocks like someone had caught us and was
set to griddle us too.
        Mrs.
Chantry, Eve Chantry, was la grande dame, the matriarch of Greenleaf, the
little town where Nathan Verney and I would spend what would seem like most of
our lives.
        Mrs.
Chantry was a widow, and among the children that gathered and spoke in hushed
tones on the boardwalk near the barber's shop she was widowed because she'd
eaten her husband when he returned from the war. The fact that Jack Chantry was
a hero who'd earned the Purple Heart and the Silver Star, a man who gave his
life to save three young men he never even knew, a man who never did come back
from the war in 1945, was hearsay and rumor and undoubtedly untrue. Eve Chantry
was a witch and a cannibal and her house was a gateway to Hades. She appeared
twice weekly, once for church, once to collect groceries, and it seemed that
when she walked from her gate there was never a child to be seen from one side
of the town to the next.
        And
Nathan worked on me, worked it good and proper, calling me scared, calling me
chicken, and every once in a while looking at me like I was the one who'd lost
the plot.
        And
so it was that Nathan Verney and me decided to put that fish in her mailbox.
        
        
        I can
honestly say that I don't ever recall being so scared. Scared is an
understatement. I was terrified, stricken, aghast. I remember approaching that house,
feeling all the color bleaching from my skin, as if my blood was sensing danger
and withdrawing even as we neared it.
        Nathan
held the fish. We had wrapped it in the same piece of linen in which my ma
wrapped my sandwiches. The fish had been out of the water for a good while. It
was dazed and wriggled weakly every once in a while. But the fish was never the
problem. It was what we intended to do with it that was the source of the
difficulties.
        If we
had been caught by Mrs. Chantry we believed we would've been skinned alive and
basted with maize oil and baked for ten minutes per pound. Perhaps served up
with some corn and salad.
        'You
take the fish up there,' Nathan said.
        'Hell,
Nathan, it was your idea. You take it up there.'
        'Yellabelly,'
he sneered. 'No better 'an a girl.'
        Had I
felt any less terrified I would have slugged him upside the head.
        'You
gotta go,' he said.
        'Why
me? Why do I have to go?'
        'Because
it'll prove you ain't wearing a streak down your back.'
        I
stood there gaping at him, my mouth open, barely breathing. I shook my head,
shook it like it would snap off if I went any faster.
        But
Nathan persisted; that was Nathan's special quality, and for a further five
minutes we stood at the bottom of Mrs. Chantry's drive and argued back and
forth in this forced and unnatural whisper.
        'You
don't go then I'm gonna scratch your name with a stone on the side of her
mailbox,' he eventually said, and there was a look in his eyes, a look of
determination that turned me cold inside.
        The
idea that he would never ever do such a thing didn't seem to enter my mind, and
it was only later that I realized that Nathan possessed another quality: he
could convince you of anything, catch you up in the fever of the moment, and
with those wide traffic-light eyes and the mouth that ran endlessly from one
side of his face to the other, he could tell you a story that was all smoke and
shadows and you'd think it gospel. Later, many times as I now recall, that
quality would both help and harm us.
        So I
took the fish.
        With
my terror, with my tight stomach and Jell-O knees, with my heart in my mouth
and my pulse racing like a bird- dog, I took one step at a time up that