Fall on Your Knees Read Online Free PDF Page B

evening, not to mention some clear thinking. He locked the piano and pocketed the key. Then he said, “I’m not cooking any more and I’m not cleaning. You do your job, missus, ’cause Lord knows I’m doing mine.”
    She looked so sad and dumpy. He had a pang of pity. Did all women get this ugly?
    “I’m sorry, James,” she said and started crying. At least it was better than that weird staring she’d been at lately. He let her hug him, knowing it would calm her. He didn’t want to be cruel. He hoped the child would be fair.
    Materia went upstairs to the attic. She knelt down, opened the hope chest and inhaled deeply. James thought Materia hadn’t filled the hope chest because she had nothing to put in it. But she kept it empty on purpose, so that nothing could come between her and the magical smell that beckoned her into memory. Cedar. She hung her head into the empty chest and allowed its gentle breath to lift and bear her away … baked earth and irrigated olive groves; the rippling veil of the Mediterranean, her grandfather’s silk farm; the dark elixir of her language, her mother’s hands stuck with parsley and cinnamon, her mother’s hands stroking her forehead, braiding her hair … her mother’s hands. The smell of the hope chest. The Cedars of Lebanon. She stopped crying, and fell asleep.

The Jewish Lady
    Mrs Luvovitz had seen the pregnant woman sitting on the cliff’s edge. Like a fixture warning ships, or luring them. People around here believed in kelpies. Mrs Luvovitz’s imagination had been infected. What could you expect with so many Catholics? They saw omens in everything. Where Mrs Luvovitz came from they called them golems .
    Maybe there’s something wrong with the woman, thought Mrs Luvovitz, maybe she’s simple. Because when Mrs Luvovitz had passed by on the Shore Road to Sydney with her cartload of eggs the other day, she had heard the woman singing what sounded like nonsense words. A poor simple-minded woman from down north in the hills perhaps. They marry their cousins once too often. But as yet Mrs Luvovitz had never seen the woman’s face, for she always wore a plaid kerchief that had the effect of blinkers.
    Mrs Luvovitz had asked her husband, Benny, if he’d seen the pregnant woman, but he never had.
    “Mr Luvovitz, you must have.”
    “I haven’t, Mrs Luvovitz.”
    “She’s there every day.”
    “Maybe she’s a ghost.”
    “Get out, Ben.”
    Benny laughed. He knew her weakness.
    Mrs Luvovitz had resolved to speak to the woman next time, because by now she was beginning to suspect she’d been all too Celtified. She needed to satisfy herself that the woman was human and not an omen. If an omen, it was important to determine certain things: “When do I usually see her? In the morning? Or evening?” A forerunner seen in the morning meant death was still a ways off. Seen in the evening, it meant get ready. A child meant the death of an innocent.
    On this day, Mrs Luvovitz was driving the Shore Road from Sydney as usual, having sold all her eggs. — “A dozen Jewish eggs, please.” — She could hardly keep up. Likewise Benny, who delivered meat in his ice-box wagon.
    “Hello,” said Mrs Luvovitz, pulling up her horse.
    The bright kerchief fluttered in the sea breeze; it was a nice day but that could mean anything.
    “Hello there,” Mrs Luvovitz repeated.
    “Hello, hello!” cried little Abe beside her.
    The plaid kerchief turned and Mrs Luvovitz said to herself, “Gott in Himmel!” A pregnant child. A dark little thing, too, she must be from away. Or from Indian Brook maybe. Mrs Luvovitz forgot all about ghosts and golems . “Where are you from, dear, who’s your mother?” — falling into the local formula.
    “I haven’t got a mother.”
    “Get in the cart, girl.”
    It was surprising to find out that the child belonged to that big new white house across the way. Mrs Luvovitz had never seen her come or go, just appear, as it were, on the cliff.
    “How