I Sing the Body Electric Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes and wished my ears would fall off. ‘Is this what you want our boys to look at last thing at night as they go to sleep?’ she says. Next thing I know, I’m on the path and here I am and here’s the raw-oyster nudes, your Honor, beg your pardon, thanks, and much obliged.”
    â€œThey do seem to be unclothed,” said the old man, looking at the two pictures, one in either hand, as if he wished to find all that this man’s wife said was in them. “I had always thought of summer, looking at them.”
    â€œFrom your seventieth birthday on, your Lordship, perhaps. But before that?”
    â€œUh, yes, yes,” said the old man, watching a speck of half-remembered lechery drift across one eye.
    When his eye stopped drifting it found Bannock and Toolery on the edge of the far rim of the uneasy sheepfold crowd. Behind each, dwarfing them, stood a giant painting.
    Bannock had got his picture home only to find he could not get the damn thing through the door, nor any window.
    Toolery had actually got his picture in the door when his wife said what a laughingstock they’d be, the only family in the village with a Rubens worth half a million pounds and not even a cow to milk!
    So that was the sum, total, and substance of this long night. Each man had a similar chill, dread, and awful tale to tell, and all were told at last, and as they finished a cold snow began to fall among these brave members of the local, hard-fighting I.R.A.
    The old man said nothing, for there was nothing really to say that wouldn’t be obvious as their pale breaths ghosting the wind. Then, very quietly, the old man opened wide the front door and had the decency not even to nod or point.
    Slowly and silently they began to file by, as past a familiar teacher in an old school, and then faster they moved. So in flowed the river returned, the Ark emptied out before, not after, the Flood, and the tide of animals and angels, nudes that flamed and smoked in the hands, and noble gods that pranced on wings and hoofs, went by, and the old man’s eyes shifted gently, and his mouth silently named each, the Renoirs, the Van Dycks, the Lautrec, and so on until Kelly, in passing, felt a touch at his arm.
    Surprised, Kelly looked over.
    And saw that the old man was staring at the small painting beneath his arm.
    â€œMy wife’s portrait of me?”
    â€œNone other,” said Kelly.
    The old man stared at Kelly and at the painting beneath his arm and then out toward the snowing night.
    Kelly smiled softly.
    Walking soft as a burglar, he vanished out into the wilderness, carrying the picture. A moment later, you heard him laughing as he ran back, hands empty.
    The old man shook his hand, once, tremblingly, and shut the door.
    Then he turned away as if the event was already lost to his wandering child mind and toddled down the hall with his scarf like a gentle weariness over his thin shoulders, and the mob followed him in where theyfound drinks in their great paws and saw that Lord Kilgotten was blinking at the picture over the fireplace as if trying to remember, was the Sack of Rome there in the years past? or was it the Fall of Troy? Then he felt their gaze and looked full on the encircled army and said:
    â€œWell now, what shall we drink to?”
    The men shuffled their feet.
    Then Flannery cried, “Why, to his Lordship, of course!”
    â€œHis Lordship!” cried all, eagerly, and drank, and coughed and choked and sneezed, while the old man felt a peculiar glistering about his eyes, and did not drink at all till the commotion stilled, and then said, “To Our Ireland,” and drank, and all said Ah God and Amen to that, and the old man looked at the picture over the hearth and then at last shyly observed, “I do hate to mention it—that picture—”
    â€œSir?”
    â€œIt seems to me,” said the old man, apologetically, “to be a trifle off-centered, on the tilt. I wonder