The Crooked Branch Read Online Free PDF Page A

priest.
    “Last week I told someone that the baby died,” I whisper.
    It’s the same whisper I use when Emma’s sleeping and I don’t want to wake her, a hope of not being heard. I can’t meet her eye now. I’m too ashamed to look up, but I imagine I hear something like empathy in her one-syllable response.
    “Oh.”
    •   •   •
    At home, the baby monitor is propped against the window frame, and I’m padding around the attic in my fluffiest (quietest) socks, careful not to wake Emma, who’s napping in the nursery below. The window is thick with grime, but that’s no match for the hard, gushing light of a September afternoon. I’m sending up rockets of dust through the sunbeams, and trying hard to avoid sneezing. Three weeks after I gave birth, my incision is still prone to frequent spasms of icy pain. Right after we bought this house, I started cleaning out the attic, but then I got too pregnant to move, and I abandoned it half-finished. I still have dreams of making it lovely, maybe a playroom for Emma, or a quiet reading nook. But in the meantime, it’s a mess, filled with semiorganized piles of junk. In one pile, clothes. In another, old newspapers, journals, and scrapbooks. In a third, rusty things: a birdcage, an old-fashioned bellows, a manual typewriter with a missing
L
. I feel like this is the pile for me.
    If there is a squirrel living here in this attic, tormenting me with his elusive crunching noises, making me think I’m going crazy, I will find him. I will make him pay. I look around at the stacks of stuff. It’s like a squirrel’s paradise. He could be anywhere. There is a heap of old handbags nearby, and I nudge it uncertainly with my toe. Nothing scurries out from beneath it. There is no sound of crunching. The steamer trunk stands alone near the window and the diagonal light cuts across it, slicing it into shadows. Could there be a nest inside? Of course not. There’s no squirrel door. But I cover my nose from the pending dust cloud, and open the sticky lid anyway. Inside, the stale scent of mothballs, some long brocade skirts, and two woolen coats. I lift the items out one at a time to throw them on the clothing pile. A small clothbound book must have been stitched into the lining of one of the coats, because there’s a gap there, just at the hem, where the threads are worn brittle and loose, and the diary just slides out from between the folds of fabric. It comes to a rest on the floorboards, in a small puff of dust beside my filthy, fluffy socks.
    In this moment, I am pierced with foreboding: goose bumps, a cold breath across my neck. There is a damp, quiet
presence
in the hushed and sun-clogged room. I can feel a distant suffering, before I even bend down slowly to retrieve the battered book, before I open it to its first fragile, yellowed page, before I see or understand the significance of the name emblazoned in mad, familiar handwriting fourteen times across the inside cover: Ginny Doyle. Ginny Doyle. Ginny Doyle.
    •   •   •
    There are all different kinds of crazy, but mostly I think it’s ancestral. Sometimes you can even trace it back along the dead branches of your family tree; you can find
evidence
in family anecdotes or documents. A sepia-stained photograph. A diary. You might think you’ve escaped its reach—you might think you’re okay. Because it can lie dormant like a tumor, until some gentle, private trauma pushes it loose inside you.

Chapter Two
    IRELAND, SEPTEMBER 1846
    G inny was on her hands and knees at the edge of the potato pit, staring in. Moisture seeped up from the soil and stained damp circles onto the knees of her petticoat. Her fingernails were caked with black earth, and a stink of rot saturated the air. She covered her nose with one hand to keep from retching. In the chilly dampness, her breath came out from behind her hand in puffy white blooms.
    “Mammy, I thought we weren’t supposed to open the pit again until spring, only as