The All of It: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the corner stall, two sods of turf, adding them to the fire and stirring it. When she returned to her place, she seemed refreshed, like someone who has inhaled a stimulating draught of cold air. But as he looked closely at her, he saw he was misreading the look on her face, that it had nothing to do with stimulation, but was rather the sharp aspect of determination.
    “Over the next couple of years, our dad would do that, lock us up every so often, whenever it came over him to do it. There was never a way ofknowing when it would be, not until it happened, if you follow me…. There’d be just his calling of us to him and our knowing by the manner of him when we got to him what was in store for us…. He was drinking more and more. A terrible lot. He’d take off on the long hike to town, you know, of a morning, and come back at dusk-time and you wouldn’t know how he could have made it home, how it was he didn’t fall and break a bone, stumbling all the way and the ground so uneven, full of stones and ruts…. Drink brought out the temper in him, too. Kevin took the worst of that. You’d not believe the strappings Kevin stood up to, Father, and not a sound out of him.” She brought her hands together: “I…I don’t know…it was always different, but always the same, too, the locking-up of us, until the time I’m to tell you about. That was in February…. It was a terrible cold winter that year…. We’d had one snowfall after another and it’d stayed in the slope-hollows. There’d been no sun for days, just the snow and sleet and the nightly freeze and more snow, regular-like, over and over…. This time I’m telling you of, we’d got up in the morning—”
    “How old were you?” he interrupted, having to know.
    “Fifteen, Kevin was, and myself just turned fourteen…. As I was saying, we’d got up thatmorning and I was just pouring out the tea when our dad said to put down our cups and get up the stairs, he had things to do in town, he said, and no time to waste. He was wild-like, and he started in telling us how our mother always liked for us to be with her when he went into town and how now we had to get upstairs to her right away as she was tidying the room and he had to be off. Raving crazy he was, in a way we’d never heard from him before. That, his crazy-talking, and the queerness coming on him at the first of the day—well, we knew to mind him. It wouldn’t have done to cross him, I mean.” She stopped. “You’re looking at me in such a way, Father…. You’re following me all right?”
    “Yes, Enda. Truly.”
    She cast upon him a speaking look, but remained silent.
    He inclined himself towards her: “You’ve all my regard,” he told her imperatively.
    She nodded like a restless dreamer. “Well, he put us in the room, but before he locked the door on us, he stood a long time just looking around, turning his head this way and that, feverish-like, you know. Jacked-up. Then, it was like he’d settled on something in his mind, he turned around and went out, locking us in after him. He locked up the whole house that day, front and back. Weheard him at it, sealing us in every way he could. Then he went off, yelling to us he’d be back after he’d seen to his affairs.”
    She broke off and looked towards the bed. He saw the swift tears come into her eyes. “Enda,” he said, “spare yourself, Enda dear…. Leave off for now. Tomorrow—”
    She drew a breath. “No,” she whispered. “I’ll finish with it. It’s for me to finish with now…,” and, lifting her head: “The room had but a slit of a window in it. You know the kind—”
    “I do,” he said, knowing bitterly well the deep, set-in type still to be seen in houses built at the time the English levied the window-tax. “I do,” he repeated. “Slits, as you say. Narrow as your fist.”
    “Aye…. That window and some breaks in the rotted-out roofing, that was all the light in the room…. I told you the house was