Leaning, Leaning Over Water Read Online Free PDF

suis mort, tu es mort, il est mort— thinking of Grandfather Meagher. I imagined him whispering the past tense in the first person to spite Mrs. Perry, at the split second of his last breath.
    “Tell us, Granny. What did he look like? What colour was his hair? Did he shout?” All the men I knew shouted. Father. Duffy. Uncle Weylin. Grampa King. Father’s friends. They shouted every time they met one another: How are ya’, you old son of a gun? How the hell are you?
    Granny Tracks seemed annoyed for a moment; she’d been through this line of questioning before. She looked at a pad of foolscap lying on the kitchen cabinet behind me and reached out a hand.
    “Give me a piece of paper,” she said. “A ruler, a good one with a steel edge. And a pencil.”
    Lyd looked up from her scrapbook
    “I can see his face so clearly,” said Granny, as if she’d dropped into a trance.
    Georgie perked up.
    She began to line the paper, cross-hatching, covering the sheet with squares, shading here and there.
    “I can see his face so clearly,” she said. Louder, this time. She was filling in the squares to shape a head.
    Father walked into the kitchen and looked over her shoulder. He cackled. “Paint by number?”
    Granny Tracks ignored him. Thinking he might have hurt her feelings, I said, “She’s drawing Grandfather Meagher.”
    Father shot through to the living room. “Now I’ve seen everything,” I heard him say to Mother. “She’s drawing a graph of your father’s face.”
    Granny Tracks moaned. “Your grandfather Meagher scratched a cross in the dirt with the toe of his boot, the day before he died.”
    “Il est mort,” I whispered.
    When the drawing was done, two off-balance eyes glowered out of the squares. The hair was black and thick and high. There was no room for ears, as his cheeks touched both edges of the page. His nose was bumpy and unrealistic. Granny didn’t know about perspective. The mouth, though, could have been the mouth of a real person. This face had no age that I could tell.
    Granny Tracks was not unpleased. She held up the paper and laughed. “First thing I’ve drawn in my entire life,” she said. Lyd and I laughed, too, thinking this a great joke. I wondered what Mother would say if I showed her.
    “Sign it, Granny,” I said. She did and I took it to my room and looked at it again, and then I flattened it into my bottom drawer.
    Georgie turned on us. He went past our bedroom, later, and stuck his head through the doorway and said, “Your whole family is nutso.”
    “They’re your family, too, Puddin’ and pie,” Lyd said.
    “He’s probably suffering from exhaustion,” I said, thinking of the weekly winter walk.
    A long closet, it was really a dark tunnel, crossed the width of the house and joined the living room to my bedroom. Not only mine; I shared the double bed with Lyd. The chimney was at our end of the tunnel, and shelves and cupboards had been built to the ceiling at the living-room end. The rest of the space was used for out-of-season coats and for storing bedding. Just past the chimney there were three plastic garment bags, each with a collapsible cardboard bottom. Right after Christmas, the garment bags were unzipped, the contents laid out on Mother’s bed.
    Here were the pastel dresses Mother created; here were strapless taffeta gowns, an abundance of crinolined skirts, strapless bras, ribboned evening bags and dyed satin shoes. Here Mother had fashioned a world from Vogue. A world unconnected to St. Pierre or Darley or to any world that I could call up. Five women who sewed had found one another in the village and formed a club. Mother was the sixth; her induction had balanced the group, half-English, half-French. One of the women was Duffy’s new girlfriend, Rebecque, whom Lyd and I adored. She said things to us like, “Always dab your perfume where there’s a pulse. Ici! Ici!” Jabbing one finger at the veins of her wrist, her temple, the side of her slender