Leaning, Leaning Over Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

top bunk, that his father had chased his mother around the house with a butcher knife. They’d sent Georgie to us while they were sorting things out. His father, Uncle Weylin, was Granny Tracks’s only son. The story was that Weylin had married a temperamental Irishwoman, Aunt Arra, who’d once kept house in northern England for a duke. Granny Tracks was glad her son had married Irish but thought her daughter-in-law affected. Maybe, we told Georgie, maybe your father isn’t Weylin, but the duke. We were thinking of money. After all, Georgie had an English name.
    We knew we couldn’t be mean to him after he blurted out the stuff about his parents; what irritated us was that he reeked of the sufferer. We were suspicious, too, because he did not seem to think our family unreasonable. He said he liked Father but we threatened to pound him when he admitted that he was glad he’d joined us in our weekly winter walk.
    “Jesus Cripes,” Lyd said, “he’s desperate for a father.”
    We were called for supper and Father squeezed in a chair for Georgie-Porgie between Eddie and me. Mother and Granny had served up bowls of thick homemade soup and set a plate of buttered bread, cut into ladyfingers, at each end of the table. We used our best manners and passed around a tray of soda biscuits and Chateau cheese, my favourite kind,flecked with pimento. I watched as Georgie pressed two soda biscuits between his palms and crumbled them into his soup, something we never did. I could see, too, that he had an eye on the Christmas baking that Mother had laid out on the shelf of the flour cupboard. I thought about Georgie being desperate for a father and I turned and stared at our own father, who was seated, unsuspecting, at the head of the table.
    After the dishes were done we cleared the table and sat back down around it. Lyd was working on her Royal scrapbook. Her Scottish penpal had just sent her a newspaper copy of the family photo on this year’s Royal Christmas card. Lyd was the only one in our entire school who had it. She’d found her penpal’s name on the back page of one of Eddie’s Scrooge comics; they wrote to each other all the time. The caption under the photo explained that the Queen and her family were standing on the steps of historic Balmoral Castle. I looked at Princess Anne and could see that she was gritting her teeth, probably because she was forced to stand still. Her hands were clenched into fat little fists. Charles looked pleased and patient beside his father, who was wearing a kilt. Elizabeth was wearing a skirt filled with pleats. She was not going to be crowned until next June but, at school, Mrs. Perry had already made us substitute the word Queen in “God save our gracious…” Both Mrs. Perry and the Queen, I could tell from the photo, wore the same kind of laced-up high-platformed shoes.
    Georgie was slumped at one end of the table, fatigued and sad-looking. Except for Granny Tracks and Lyd, the others had left the room.
    I started working on Granny to tell us about GrandfatherMeagher, dead before I was born. Before any grandchild, for that matter. There were so few photographs on either side—Meaghers and Kings—Lyd said the two families must have dirt to hide. One tintype of Grandfather Meagher did exist but this was back in Ontario, in Granny’s Darley home. It was kept in a cigar box in her rolltop desk and we seldom got to see it. The tintype was bent lengthwise through the middle and Grandfather Meagher’s sepia face was trapped in this permanent concave fault. Even so, I was certain from the erectness of his posture that if he were alive, we would not be calling him Grampa Tracks.
    I had often thought of him in school when practising the sixteen être verbs, glancing up at the row of cardboard charts above the blackboards. My tongue passed over mourir. Mrs. Perry had shrieked, “You can’t use the past tense of mourir with je!” Because it was forbidden, I murmured as I conjugated— Je