The Crane Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

unravelling under the threat of a single, terrible finger, looming as large as a coming apocalypse from which there would be no mercy, no forgiveness, just everlasting despair. Who wouldn’t lash out in the face of such a terrible affront?
    That his mother had gotten it accidentally exactly right, well, that seemed to be just one of those things, and a part of him was pleased for her that, for once, she had. But the story that was told and the story
underneath
that story were different things, and perhaps irreconcilable.
    The immediate result, anyway, was that George was airlifted out of Miss Jones’s third grade class at Henry Bozeman Elementary School and sent to the O Come O Come Emmanuel & Ransom Captive Israel Self-Directed Learning and Holiness Academy, which despite having ‘Israel’ in its name was wholly staffed by people who might never have actually met anyone Jewish in their entire lives. (Growing up in Tacoma, George knew any number of other evangelicals, plus a packet of Mormons, a few Catholics, and even practising Buddhists from the largest integrated Asian community in the country. Jewish people, not so much. He would only actually meet two Jewish people in his life before going to college in New York. Where he met several more.)
    O Come O Come – loosely affiliated with his parents’ church, if perhaps only by good intentions – had a student body of a mere forty-eight pupils, kindergarten through twelfth grade, with learning done from self-read (and often self-marked) booklets, plus a half-day on Wednesday when the O Come O Come visiting minister held a church service in lieu of afternoon classes. This involved songs and sermons and a once-weekly change from the school uniform of yellow shirt with green tie and trousers to
white
shirt with green tie and trousers.
    George was eight, and at eight the definition of normal is whatever is happening in front of you. He glossed over the differences from public school – starting with the comprehensively pale ethnicity of his new classmates – and got on with it, doing his usual ingratiation with the two elderly bachelorettes who ran the school: Miss Kelly with her red hair pulled back so tight she looked permanently surprised and Miss Aldershot with her kindly eyes, hairy chin and vicious way with a ruler.
    George enjoyed himself there, on the whole, though his standards weren’t perhaps wildly high. He wasn’t a fan of the school-wide dodgeball, which was about all the elderly bachelorettes could come up with by way of physical education, aside from the occasional round of jumping jacks and running in place (all done for brief, sweaty spates without ever involving the removal of a tie), but he liked their library, though even ‘darn’ and ‘gosh’ had been blacked out of the school’s dog-eared copy of
The Incredible Journey
.
    The boy closest to him in age there was Roy, an old-fashioned name even then, if not in quite the same way as ‘George’. Roy was a year older, a year taller, a year wiser, all of which was proved by the fact that he had a bike.
    ‘It’s from the War,’ he’d said to George when they first met. ‘My dad brought it back. He stole it from the Japs after we bombed them.’
    This was the seventies and Roy’s dad was undoubtedly not much more than an infant during Nagasaki, but George swallowed every word like God’s Own Truth.
    ‘Wow,’ he said.
    ‘That’s why it’s so heavy,’ Roy said, tipping it up with some effort in his nine-year-old hands. ‘To survive the grenade attacks when you ride behind enemy lines.’
    ‘Wow.’
    ‘When I get older, I’m riding it all the way to Vietnam and throw grenades at the Japs.’
    ‘Can I try it?’
    ‘No.’
    The school was on 35th Street. Roy lived on 56th and George lived on 60th in a house no one in the family would remember fondly. Usually his mother, who didn’t work, would pick him up at school and drive him home, but occasionally, when she was busy, he’d walk,