Cat's eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

moose-maple leaves dangling from the branches like seaweed. We felt sleepy until it began to snow. Now we feel exhilarated.
    We’re running around outside the motel, wearing nothing but our worn-out summer shoes, with our bare hands outstretched to the falling snowflakes, our heads thrown back, our mouths open, eating snow. If it were thick on the ground we would roll in it, like dogs in dirt. It fills us with the same kind of rapture. But our mother looks out the window and sees us, and the snow, and makes us come inside and dry our feet off with the skimpy towels. We have no winter boots that fit. While we’re inside, the snow turns to sleet. Our father is pacing the floor, jingling his keys in his pocket. He always wants things to happen sooner than they do, and now he wants to leave right away, but my mother says he’ll have to hold his horses. We go outside and help him scrape the crust of ice off the car windows and then we carry boxes, and finally we squeeze into the car ourselves and drive south. I know it’s south because of the direction of the sunlight, which is coming weakly through the clouds now, touching the icy trees with glitter, glaring off the ice patches at the sides of the road, making it hard to see.
    Our parents say we’re going to our new house. This time the house will be really ours, not rented. It’s in a city called Toronto. This name means nothing to me. I think about the house in my school reader, white, with a picket fence and a lawn, and window curtains. I want to see what my bedroom will be like. By the time we arrive at the house it’s late afternoon. At first I think there must be some mistake; but no, this is the house all right, because my father is already opening the door with a key. The house is hardly on a street at all, more like a field. It’s square-shaped, a bungalow, built of yellow brick and surrounded by raw mud. On one side of it is an enormous hole in the ground, with large mud piles heaped around it. The road in front is muddy too, unpaved, potholed. There are some concrete blocks sunk in the mud for stepping-stones so we can get to the door.
    Inside, things are even more daunting. There are doors and windows, true, and walls, and the furnace works. There’s a picture window in the living room, though the view is of a large expanse of rippling mud. The toilet actually flushes, though it has a yellowish-brown ring around the inside of the bowl and several floating cigarette butts; and reddish, warmish water comes from the hot water tap when I turn it on. But the floors are not polished wood or even linoleum. They’re made of wide, rough boards with cracks in between, gray with plaster dust and scattered with white speckles, like bird droppings. Only a few of the rooms have light fixtures; the others have wires dangling out of the middle of the ceiling. There are no counters in the kitchen, only the bare sink; there’s no stove. Nothing is painted. Dust is on everything: the windows, the window ledges, the fixtures, the floor. There are a lot of dead flies around.
    “We all have to pitch in,” says our mother, which means that we are not to complain. We will have to do the best we can, she says. We will have to finish the house ourselves, because the man who was supposed to do it has gone bankrupt. Flown the coop, is how she puts it. Our father is not so cheerful. He paces around the house, peering and prodding at it, muttering to himself and making small whistling noises. “Son of a gun, son of a gun,” is what he says.
    From somewhere in the depths of the car our mother unearths a primus stove, which she sets up on the kitchen floor, since there is no table. She begins to heat up some pea soup. My brother goes outside; I know he’s climbing up the mountain of dirt next door, or assessing the possibilities of the large hole in the ground, but I don’t have the heart to join him.
    I wash my hands in the reddish water in the bathroom. There’s a crack in the