If I Told You Once: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

rooster, his claws clenched in her nightgown, one red eye frozen and empty.
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    It was a winter years later when I made my decision. I must have been about sixteen then, I think, about your age. My mother and I were wringing wet clothes, hanging them out to dry in the cold air, my mother hugely pregnant as usual. Snow gritty as dust stung our faces. I saw her pause, sniff her fingers, then inhale deeply. She looked around wildly and ran. She had smelled the gunpowder stink of approaching soldiers.
    We followed, my brothers and sisters and I. We were all so occupied with helping our mother hide our father that we neglected Ari.
    We forgot Ari, so the first thing the soldiers saw when they entered the village was my brother tearing a live sheep apart with his bare hands, not for sport but simply out of his rough love.
    The soldiers on their recruiting mission had heard rumors of a boy with impossible brutelike strength, and they had searched far and wide for him. Though nothing was said about it we knew it was our disgruntled, worm-racked neighbors who must have told them where to find him.
    The soldier captain watched Ari rip the sheep piece from piece, till it was nothing but bloody meat, and then Ari laid the pieces out, carefully lined them up. He was trying to put the animal back together, licking his fingers and crooning, cramming the limbs back into their sockets, breathing into the nostrils, trying to divine the clockwork that made it all move and bleat.
    The captain watched, and his eyes gleamed; he clapped his hands, one of which was made of wood. His company of soldiers circled, and they wrapped my brother in iron chains which on his massive wrists and throat looked like flimsy jewelry, and they loaded him bawling into a cart to take him away to hone his special skills for the grand art of war, or so they said, and they tossed the chunks of sheep in after him, hoping to quiet him.
    My mother ran from the house and chased after the departing cart, flinging curses at the soldiers, heaping them tenfold on their heads. The soldiers leaned down and jeered at her, with her swollen belly and waddling run. She spat at them, and one leaned down and dealt her such a blow that she fell in the mud and went into premature labor, right there in the street, before the eyes of all the men in the village.
    For a single man to witness a birth was bad luck; for all the village men to witness it was such a bad omen that all the ensuing trouble that later befell the village was heaped on my mother; everyone said she was to blame for all that happened after and the village women never spoke to her again.
    When all these things happened I knew it was time to leave.
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    Once upon a time, on a night when the houses lay buried to the eaves in snowdrifts and bits of ice danced on the wind, I left my village intending never to return.
    Earlier that evening I had gone to bed in the back room with my brothers and sisters as usual. The others sighed and slept. I felt the warmth leave my fingers and feet.
    I listened to my parents in their room. The bed frame creaked as my father sank down on it. I could picture him, his feet hanging off the end of the frame, head tipped back and the coarse beard sticking straight up.
    Light seeped through the crack beneath their door. My mother was awake, I pictured her finishing some mending or nursing the latest child. She kept her hair covered during the day, and at night she put it in a single tight braid that reached past her waist in a thick, vicious-looking rope.
    I listened to the sounds of the other room, my ears yearning toward the door: the whisper of candle flame, the creak of her chair, the chilling click of teeth as she bit off the thread. I hoarded the warm patch I had made in the sheets.
    A strip of moonlight slanted through the window. I could see arms, fingers, ears: my younger brothers and sisters, sleeping in a heap like puppies. Some sucked their fingers as they