The Big Why Read Online Free PDF Page B

run of the. His son Bob’s room or the.
    He did not know I was here to stay in Brigus for the rest of my life. I told him about my family. How I’d come ahead to secure a house.
    Well there are other houses. We’ll find you one. My daughters have one across the.
    He pushed his arm to the side.
    Rupert and I went back downstairs to the red sofa. There were biscuits and cheese, cooked potatoes and carrots, and a sweet pickle. There was a dark meat.
    That’s bottled turre, Rupert said. A seabird.
    It’s fine, I said. It tasted very gamey. I picked up the binoculars and applied them to the Head, as they called it. Just a quiet arm of land.
    How come no one’s ever built out there.
    There is a house, Rupert said.
    There’s nothing out there.
    She’s well hidden. In this light you’d never see it. Halfway to the lighthouse. Out by the naked man.
    Pardon?
    There’s a pile of stones near the headland. We call it the naked man.
    There are no lights on.
    No one lives out there. Is it just you and your wife?
    We have three children.
    It’s a little tight, Rupert said. And a little out of the way.
    I like out of the way.
    It’s a snug little house for all that, he said. I’ll look into it. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He was nervous. Youve arrived, he said, during the hungry month. You’ll be wanting friends around you. That’s how we get by.
    Rupert had liked how I smiled at that youngster. The Dobies are good people, he said, and it was tragic what happened to the father. It should not have happened, that. What a mistake. I am a man, he said, who believes the world belongs to children. Though I dont have any children.
    Rupert was a stiff man with that fastidious moustache. It could make you nervous. The Bartlett lip. Representing everything formal and unfeeling in the world. But the Bartletts were not cool men. They had been handed a stiff, severe lip and did their best to work around it. Rupert’s shoulders were tight and this was a Bartlett trait too, something Methodist, and I knew the word methodical applied and that was Rupert to a tee. Struggling to rid himself of Methodism. True. He did not press his pants. He had two years to live and we were both oblivious to it.
11
    I stayed the night in Bob Bartlett’s bed. The sheets were fresh and rough. There was a big hardcover book on the night table: Warren’s Household Physician . On the shelf Hudson’s Bay scotch whisky, seven volumes of the classics, skate blades, an enamel cup, leather skates. There were crates on the floor of baking powder and Sunshine Biscuits ( USA ). Maxwell House tea, Prince Albert tobacco. They used this room for storage.
    I missed my wife beside me. Kathleen became most herself in sleep. I loved it when, nearly morning, she’d push me. Then she’d tug at my head. She was deeply asleep, but aware too. She wanted me. She’d haul my neck to her. Nuzzle her face in my shoulder, tug on my cock. That demand of me, almost unconscious. The reason she could do it, to be selfish.
    There was a toilet across the hall, and I got up in the dark to use it. The toilet was a new thing for the Bartlett house. The first to have it in Brigus. But someone was in it. Then out came a woman carrying a kerosene lamp, her dark hair down, in a nightdress. It was Emily. I stepped back. The lamp lit up her wrist. Light poured down the inside of her arm.
    Pardon me, she said.
    So she slept here.
    In the morning the sisters, Eleanor and Emma Bartlett, came over. Emily brought in porridge, eggs, toast and coffee, and a jar of English marmalade, and I told my story. I knew the gesture I gave was Gerald Thayer’s: it was a way of pushing the hand out as though dealing cards. I didnt know what I was telling the Bartletts, but I laughed at the fact that I was even speaking in a Thayer sort of manner about New York. My strength was devoted to noticing my push into the world, rather than the content of what I was saying as I pushed. I saw that Rupert was impressed by