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

till he’d got me soothed down. He’d make a clown’s face, put his thumbs to his mouth and stretch his lips back to his ears, stand on his head—whatever—anything antic, you know, to make me laugh. He was good that way. Tender as a mother. So when I started crying after he said that about our dad’s not coming back, he jerked right into cheering me up, said it was a foolish thing, the very idea of our dad’s not turning up, him a bad penny, and I should put it straight out of my head. And furthermore—very excited he was now—furthermore, he said, when our dad did come back and we were loose again, we’d grab the first chance we got to run off. Leave Donegal behind us forever. South, he said we’d go, that we’d not stay about and ever again let ourselves in for another locking-up like this one. He’d been planning it, he said, our running away, how we’d get along and all, letting ourselves out as a pair, him at stable and yardwork and me indoors as helper to a cook or at laundering. It was lovely the way he told how it would be. Like a dream….
    “Very quieting to me, too. Made me fall asleep…or not what you’d exactly call asleep, for when I did stir again, it wasn’t like a proper waking-up at all—fresh, you know, and on the ready—but only a slow sort of coming ’round and of feeling terrible dizzy….
    “There was a first bit of dawn-light beginning to show through the breaks in the roof…. Kevin, when I turned to him, was just as he’d been when I drifted off, sitting with his back against the door, his legs straight out before him, only now his eyes were closed so I figured him to be asleep…. But then”—her eyes widened and a stricken look came over her face—“I got terrible frightened over something about him, the stiff way he was sitting maybe it was, or that I couldn’t hear him breathing, and I edged my way closer to him so I could see him better.” Her eyes filled now with terror: “He looked—” she shuddered, “—his face and his hands—the fingers—they were the colour of set tallow, and, I don’t know, I lost my head…went daft, I suppose you’d say…screamed and startedin shaking, thinking he was dead—”
    At this crisis-point of the past and as he intently watched at work the present mounting effects of her recollected anguish, himself in the power of her profound capacity, the cords of her neck enlarged and throbbed and her body seemed suddenly to heave itself upright and the room to fill with a strangling scream, coming from her throat.
    “Enda!” he cried, brought to his feet. “Enda,” stooping to her, “Swallow! Can you swallow?” taking up her half-empty cup, holding it to her lips, and, as the fluid spilled, his hand on her throat, rubbing it: “Enda, Enda,” then, seeing her breast lift and heave with a rasped-in draught of air: “ Enda dear ,” his relief a moan.
    She sat back, spent and, in his near, urgent look, remote; yet on his arm her hand’s hold, the grip more powerful for its wordlessness: “Enda,” he whispered passionately, a stranger to himself.
    She caught—he saw it happen—the intense interiority of the voice he hardly recognized as his own (what had been done to him?) and instantly withdrew her hand from his arm. Then, in a distant, gathered way that sent him from her back to his chair: “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought it was laid deeper to rest in me than I see it is.”
    “But you’re all right now?” he asked, staging matter-of-factness. “You’re sure?”
    “I am,” she answered, regarding him from what he accepted as being her position of control; and, after a moment, “So I’ll go on?”
    He nodded.
    “He wasn’t dead of course, Kevin…. My screaming”—she shifted in her chair—“it jolted him. Wagged him to like he’d been jumped! So I knew he was all right. Saw that he was, I mean.” Her brows came together in a frown of wonderment. “Rightly, knowing he was alive, I should have