The Book of Fires Read Online Free PDF Page A

everywhere, like big seeds of dirt. In summer we cut lengths of water mint and rue to strew over the boards in the upstairs chamber, in the hope that mice will not climb up and eat our hair in the night or make nests in the straw of our bedding.
    “If I was choosing,” William had said, watching us from the doorway, “I should make my whole nest from herbs and feathers.”
    “If you were a mouse, you mean,” I’d said to him.
    “If I was one.” And I’d laughed at his earnest look and scooped him up and buried my face in his hair out of merriment. How things have changed.
    I knock the mud from my boots at the back door, then sit down in the corner to clean them. There is a quietness in the room, under the chat and the noise of the knives chopping. The cat mews once outside the closed back door, then goes away. My uncle whistles something through his teeth.
    “Why are you greasing your boots, Agnes?” William asks suddenly. He has come and sat beside me. Everybody stops talking, and looks around at me. There is a silence. Or perhaps I have imagined it, as they are talking again.
    “They are so dry, William,” I reply in a low voice. “I had to catch them before the cracks set in, before the wetness of the puddles began to soak through them too easily. Shall I do your boots for you? ”
    He unlaces his boots, which are too big for him, and takes them off, then sits down beside me on the floor in his woollen stockings while I again warm the grease, which has cooled and stiffened. His feet look small. He watches me work the warm liquid evenly into the leather with a piece of rag. When I have finished, our two pairs of boots are dark and shiny.
    “Thank you, Agnes,” William says, and the face that he turns to me is pleased and trusting. I get up to put the greasepot away on the high shelf, so that he cannot see my eyes filling with tears.
    Traitor’s tears, I think.
    Crying is no good. I remember the time that my mother, enraged at my wallowing over some squabble with Ann, cried out, “Upset? There is no place for upsetness before a pot over the fire, my girl.” And my slapped cheek stung in the heat of the flames, the salt taste of my tears mingling with the smell of scorched soup overboiling and hissing into the hot wood ash on the hearth. No, tears are uncommon in this house.
    That was the year the cold was so bitter at pig-killing time that even the running stream froze at the edge where it touched the bank; swollen icy webs clung about the stems of reeds like boiled sugar.
    At the hearth I watch my mother slip Lil another piece of kidney when she thinks my father cannot see, in the same way that she keeps a brown crock of honey in a secret place behind the barrels in the outhouse, and gives a spoonful of it to Lil to make a difference to her bad days, when she has them. My father does not know; it might stoke his wrath unnecessarily. My mother thinks I do not know about the honey either, but when Lil comes close with her breath smelling of sugar and flowers it is hard not to notice. Once I took a spoon out there and prized up the sticky cork to help myself when no one was home. The honey was like metal and blood and summer all together in my mouth, but the guilty taste was the one I remembered, day after day for weeks. I didn’t do it again.
    We sell the honey from the hive if there is enough. Hive money, egg money, bird money when my father has trapped larks and snipe. “The wealthy suffer from their fancy palates and inconstant appetites,” he says. “So we must offer something delicate, and should it tempt the shillings from their silky purses when they pay off the butcher, so much the better.” That thought made him wink at me. It all goes toward the important things we need: flour, salt, twine, the mending of pots and boots.
    The day draws on.
    Later we sit at the trestle table together and eat, although I can taste nothing but the smell of the raw pig everywhere, and I find I cannot swallow the