Last Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

ever seen, my mother always said about the cat. Once she told me about the curse that had befallen everyone who disturbed the king’s tomb. One of the explorers had had his canary devoured by a cobra the day after he unsealed the chamber.Another had died of an insect bite to the face. The night that this happened, the man’s dog, who was thousands of miles away, let out a terrible howl and dropped dead. But the worst was the very last. There was a woman explorer on the trip and she alone seemed to have escaped harm. Twenty years passed without incident. Then one morning she went up to the attic and hung herself with a piece of laundry line. The note she left behind said: “I have succumbed to a curse that has forced me to depart from this life.” This was my favorite part of the story and my mother indulged me by telling it again and again. “And to think,” she said, “that this woman was a scientist just like your father!”
    Sometimes I worried that the curse would fall on our family too. But my father said that this was just superstition. Superstition was when you believed in supernatural powers, I knew. It was crossing your fingers for luck or not stepping on a crack or going to church to pray for your soul.
    I had never been to church because my father had vowed to raise me a heathen. A heathen was a godless thing, my mother explained. In some parts of America, it was against the law to be one. On Sundays, I watched from the woods as the Christians drove by. The women had on dresses and the men wore dark suits. Sometimes I threw rocks at their cars and waited to see what God would do. Nothing much, it turned out.
    One of the cars that passed by every Sunday belonged to my teacher, Mrs. Carr. She always wore ahat and gloves and looked straight ahead as she drove. I was careful to hide behind the trees so she wouldn’t see me. I had an idea that she didn’t like to be watched. Sometimes when she wrote on the board, her fingers trembled violently. As soon as she sat down, she’d clasp them together and hide them beneath her desk.
    I was a little afraid of her. She was so old her skin was transparent, and one of her eyes was clouded over like milk. My mother told me that she lived all alone in a dome-shaped house at the edge of the lake. Her husband had built it for her and it was supposed to be powered by the sun, but sometimes it didn’t work. When it rained, Mrs. Carr brought blankets and a pillow and slept in the nurse’s office at school. In her purse she carried a small radio so she could listen to the weather reports. “Shh,” she’d say, holding it to her ear. “I think there’s a storm front coming in.”
    Twice already that year, I had made her cry. Once when I stole her radio and once when I told her I didn’t believe in God. “What a terrible thing to say, Grace,” she said. “Don’t you realize you’re named after God’s greatest gift of all?” That night, when I asked my father if this was true, he called Mrs. Carr an ignorant fool. He threw down the paper and paced around the room. “Calm down, Jonathan,” my mother told him, but it was too late. Already he’d dragged the phone into the living room.
    I knew my father was going to call Mrs. Carr and read to her from his favorite book. The book wascalled
Know Your Constitution!
and my father carried it with him everywhere. This was the book he quoted from whenever he wrote to the newspaper.
    My mother got up from the table and closed the door. “Poor woman,” she said.
    In the next room, my father was yelling something. “Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the separation of church and state,” I heard him say.
    The next day my father gave me a copy of the book to give to Mrs. Carr. Don’t be tedious, Jonathan, my mother said, but he slipped it in my backpack anyway.
    When I gave her the book, Mrs. Carr frowned and put it away in a bottom drawer. I told her that I had been named after my mother’s aunt, who had red hair and choked