Klee Wyck Read Online Free PDF Page B

rambled, seeking out Sophie’s graves.
    Some had little wooden crosses, some had stones. Two babies lay outside the cemetery fence: they had not faced life long enough for baptism.
    “See! Me got stone for Rosie now.”
    “It looks very nice. It must have cost lots of money, Sophie.”
    “Grave man make cheap for me. He say, ‘You got lots, lots stone from me, Sophie. Maybe bymby you get some more died baby, then you want more stone. So I make cheap for you.’”
    S OPHIE’S KITCHEN was crammed with excited women. They had come to see Sophie’s brand-new twins. Sophie was on a mattress beside the cook stove. The twin girls were in small basket papoose cradles, woven by Sophie herself. The babies were wrapped in cotton wool which made their dark little faces look darker; they were laced into their baskets and stuck up at the edge of Sophie’s mattress beside the kitchen stove. Their brown, wrinkled faces were like potatoes baked in their jackets, their hands no bigger than brown spiders.
    They were thrilling, those very, very tiny babies. Everybody was excited over them. I sat down on the floor close to Sophie.
    “Sophie, if the baby was a girl it was to have my name. There are two babies and I have only one name. What are we going to do about it?”
    “The biggest and the best is yours,” said Sophie.
    My Em’ly lived three months. Sophie’s Maria lived three weeks. I bought Em’ly’s tombstone. Sophie bought Maria’s.
    S OPHIE’S “MAD” rampaged inside her like a lion roaring in the breast of a dove.
    “Look see,” she said, holding a red and yellow handkerchief, caught together at the corners and chinking with broken glass and bits of plaster of Paris. “Bad boy bloke my grave flower! Cost five dollar one, and now boy all bloke fo’ me. Bad, bad boy! You come talk me fo’ p’liceman?”
    At the City Hall she spread the handkerchief on the table and held half a plaster of Paris lily and a dove’s tail up to the eyes of the law, while I talked.
    “My mad fo’ boy bloke my plitty glave flower,” she said, forgetting, in her fury, to be shy of the “English words.”
    The big man of the law was kind. He said, “It’s too bad, Sophie. What do you want me to do about it?”
    “You make boy buy more this plitty kind for my glave.”
    “The boy has no money but I can make his old grandmother pay a little every week.” Sophie looked long at the broken pieces and shook her head.
    “That ole, ole woman got no money.” Sophie’s anger was dying, soothed by sympathy like a child, the woman in her tender towards old Granny. “My bloke no matter for ole woman,” said Sophie, gathering up the pieces. “You scold boy big, Policeman? No make glanny pay.”
    “I sure will, Sophie.”
    T HERE WAS A BLACK SKIRT spread over the top of the packing case in the centre of Sophie’s room. On it stood the small white coffin. A lighted candle was at the head, another at the foot. The little dead girl in the coffin held a doll in her arms. It had hardly been out of them since I had taken it to her a week before. The glassy eyes of the doll stared out of the coffin, up past the closed eyelids of the child.
    Though Sophie had been through this nineteen times before, the twentieth time was no easier. Her two friends, Susan and Sara, were there by the coffin, crying for her.
    The outer door opened and half a dozen women came in, their shawls drawn low across their foreheads, their faces grim. They stepped over to the coffin and looked in. Then they sat round it on the floor and began to cry, first with baby whimpers, softly, then louder, louder still—with violence and strong howling: torrents of tears burst from their eyes and rolled down their cheeks. Sophie and Sara and Susan did it too. It sounded horrible—like tortured dogs.
    Suddenly they stopped. Sophie went to the bucket and got water in a tin basin. She took a towel in her hand and went to each of the guests in turn holding the basin while they washed