Small Beneath the Sky Read Online Free PDF

Crozier had become a Mormon. All I knew about her new religion was that she couldn’t drink coffee or tea but instead sipped hot water poured from the kettle she kept on the back of the wood stove. Sometimes she’d look straight at me and issue a strange warning: if I ate too many Fudgsicles, I’d lose my hair. Since I wasn’t particularly fond of them, I puzzled over the meaning of her words. Maybe once I’d brought one into her house and let it drip on her floor. Maybe she’d seen me suck the melting chocolate with too much pleasure.
    We never went into her tiny bedroom in the back. During our visits, we perched on the edge of the camp bed in the room that served as both living room and kitchen, or we stood near the stove and fridge. A big man with his arms spread could have touched both walls. He’d have had to stoop so his head wouldn’t brush the ceiling. I could never remember what we talked about. Grandma probably asked, “How’s school,” as every adult did, but I wouldn’t have told her anything. In the only chair, her swollen leg propped on a stool, she swallowed water with no colour and no flavour, warming something cold inside.
    At first I worried her affliction might be genetic, and one day I’d wake up with a leg I had to heft from bed and drag behind me, waves of milk slapping the inner walls of my skin, walleyed, lice-ridden barn cats yowling behind me. Finally I decided it was God’s punishment. With perfect irony, he’d smitten her with an excess of sweet maternal liquid—in the breast, a source of nurturance and love; in her leg, a heavy, sour weight that caused suffering, a visible sign of her betrayal of her son and the hurt he would carry into death. I could think of no better vengeance for my father, who loved her anyway and wouldn’t have asked for such a thing. Milk leg, I whispered inside her little house while the grown-ups talked, milk leg, God’s righteous anger curdling on my tongue.

first cause: mom and dad
    HIS FAVOURITE breakfast is Cream of Wheat. His favourite supper is roast chicken with mashed potatoes. His favourite bread is store-bought white, though your mom bakes her own. His favourite shirt has snap buttons and two pockets, one for cigarettes, one for pens. His favourite pen shows two minks, one on top of the other. It’s in the bottom drawer of his side of the dresser, below the hankies your mother washes and irons. You’re not supposed to know it’s there. His favourite story is how he picked up a semi trailer from the factory in Windsor years ago, drove it through Detroit and all the way to Swift Current without stopping for a sleep. His favourite competition is arm wrestling. He wins all the matches at the Healy Hotel. You wish your arms were as hairy and powerful as his. His favourite expression is “real good.” His favourite drink is Pilsner Old Style. Before you could read, you sat on his lap and counted the crows on the label. His favourite TV program is Don Messer’s Jubilee. He always says, “Look at old Charlie dance.” He doesn’t have a favourite book. The only thing he reads is the Swift Current Sun. He follows the lines with one finger, the nail bitten to the quick, and reads everything three times. You don’t know how much he understands.
    HER FAVOURITE drink is water from a tap. Her favourite outfit is a loose tank top that covers her belly and a matching pair of shorts with an elastic waist. Her favourite game is curling. She’d miss a wedding or a funeral to watch the final in the Tournament of Hearts. Her favourite dance is the foxtrot. Her favourite dog is still a bull terrier named Patsy that Dad bought when they got married. There are two photographs of her holding your brother at eight months old above Patsy’s back as if he were sitting on the dog, but he isn’t. Her favourite possession is two Dionne Quintuplet spoons. The letters