The Book of Fires Read Online Free PDF

rough bread at all. William leans over, still chewing at his own, to grab my bread and press it eagerly between his little teeth. Nobody scolds him, as nobody notices, they are so occupied in being well fed. I do not enjoy the thick stew made with pig’s liver and pig’s kidneys that Lil ladles out to all of us from the blackened pot. Instead I watch my mother’s bony hands spoon gravy into Hester’s open mouth until her bowl is empty. “This is good,” we all say, trying not to seem too hungry before my aunt.
    I go to the loom.
    I am thinking hard and yet not thinking at all. It is as though my mind were all in pieces.
     
    It had almost happened once before, I remember, when I was sat with John Glincy on the bank, one time in spring. I’d let the pig go on slowly down the lane, snouting at roots all by itself. I would have been in trouble if they’d caught me doing that, just letting a weaner go wandering off.
    “It’s nothing but playing, is it, Ag?” he’d said, as his hand was inching up inside my underskirt. I didn’t mind, I told myself.
    His face took on a strange shape as he was talking, as though it had a lot to concentrate on. His hand was rough and didn’t stay still. I didn’t think much on it either way, and no one ever saw, so what harm was it? In truth I did not know what I should have said to make him stop. Like I say, no one saw, and besides, old Mr. Jub came shuffling over the brow of the hill and John Glincy slid his hand out quick enough then, and touched his hat, if you please, to Mr. Jub as he passed us by; Mr. Jub who leaned so heavily upon his stick it looked as though he were punishing the ground at every step. Then he went off.
    That afternoon I saw John Glincy beating at his dogs on his walk home with a viciousness that made me catch my breath. His father is angry like that, too; we heard there was a working dog at Gallop’s Farm, over Findon way, that he killed by kicking at it until it fell down. My mother says there must be some kind of ill-luck in the earth under their dwelling house, they have had so many troubles there. Yet John Glincy is blessed with a head of thick yellow hair, the color of straw, so that it is his head that stands out brightly against the darkness of the field when the men are driving the plows and the sun shines down on them. That makes him hard to gainsay or refuse in any way; he is so unyielding, and goes at a matter until he has it, like a hound after a hare.
     
     
    “Are you sickening now, Agnes?” my mother asks impatiently as I sit working the loom in the corner, and I realize that my feet have paused over the treadles. I shake my head. I can’t tell her that I am full up inside and that there are coins hard on my skin wherever I go and that they feel already like a great weight. I fling the shuttle backward and forward through the warp with a vigor that I muster from a wretched part of myself.
    Yet I am certain that my aunt stops in the doorway to stare at me before she goes home to wash. I do not turn my head, but I can hear her rustling and breathing and the creak of the basket over her arm. It is as though she hesitates, then does not say a thing. I wait till I have thrown six more rows before I look around, but I find the doorway is empty; there is just a darkness as the sun goes behind a cloud.
    I have made up my mind.

3
    T he next day passes. By afternoon the light is failing more quickly than the approach of sundown, and the sparrows stop piping in the hedge outside. When it is too dim to work at the loom, I go to the window and see that there is not a breath of wind and that the sky has thickened into low cloud. Even as I watch, a gray November sea fog begins to roll in over the hills and down the scarp slope through the woods, like a vast, damp smoke engulfing the house. How cold it is.
    “When you were up at Mrs. Mellin’s yesterday,” my mother says, “I hope you told her that I said she is welcome to walk to Mutton’s Farm with