The Law of Dreams Read Online Free PDF

pick up
     the milk pail.
    Phoebe Carmichael had always been perfect as far as he was concerned.
     Distinct mind like a polished ax. The two of them, babies in baskets left under swaying
     trees, alongside a meadow. Wind sweeping through high grass with a sound like bedsheets
     tearing.
    It’s funny when you’re dying and never have been with a
     girl.
    He watched her backing away, then turning, fleeing from him across the
     paved farmyard. Fleeing slowly, lugging the steel pail with both hands.
    He watched her disappear into the farmhouse with its glass windows and
     slate roof gleaming in the fresh wet of the morning.
    He turned, started back up the mountain. There seemed nowhere else to go.
     He felt extremely lonely. It seemed as if Phoebe had been his last hold on life. Later
     that morning on the upper slopes his hungry dog caught a scent and ran off howling, and
     he never did see her again.
    THEY ATE sparrows, songbirds. His mother pleaded with
     his father to quit, but he would not. He had been leaving all his life and now he
     wouldn’t.
    Exactly why, Fergus could not say. A feeling in the
     blood. Perhaps he shared it. Perhaps they had something in common after all.
    They finished what was left of the yellow meal and lasted another two
     weeks on stirabout, mostly water, with wild herbs and nettles boiled soft. They
     gradually lost the strength needed to snare and trap small game and spent more of each
     day in bed.
    Carmichael kept away. Fergus did not go down to the farm again or see
     Phoebe. He was just strong enough to tend the fire, feeding it little parcels of turf.
     His father had stopped speaking. Then his mother. They lay glassy-eyed in their bed.
    They saw no dragoons. The little girls lay in the loft mewing like cats.
     Their bed straw grew filthy, and Fergus hadn’t strength to change it. One
     afternoon he spent hours — or maybe it was just a few moments — watching a
     spider scuttle in and out of the fire.
    WITH A little water, dying will last a long time.
    It was black fever in the end. Typhus.
    The first sign a raging headache. He understood what it meant. While it
     was still possible to think more or less clearly he made himself smoor the fire,
     carefully, so it would burn as long as possible. If it went out, there was no
     possibility of lighting it again. Then he climbed into the sleeping loft, lay down on
     the straw, slept and dreamed. He could always stir up Phoebe in his dreams. In his
     dreams that girl came up out of herself with enthusiasm deep and furious. It was her
     gift.

Ejection
    HE AWOKE TO THE SCENT of a soldier.
    Grease, gunpowder. The polish applied to brass.
    Pungent and complex, the scent filtered into his brain and startled his
     stomach, which drenched itself with acid that rose, scorching his throat, and made him
     cough. The cough blew him awake.
    His eyelids were glued with crust, and it hurt tearing them open. He lay
     on a pallet in the sleeping loft of the cabin, his two sisters beside him. His skin felt
     stiff, but the sores on his arms and legs appeared to be healing. The air was hazy with
     smoke from the fire he had smoored hours, or days, earlier, just before giving himself
     up to the fever.
    Peering down from the loft, he could see the soldier standing just inside
     the door.
    Fergus sat up suddenly, and the soldier yelped in fear and started backing
     out. The tip of his bayonet caught the cowhide flap in the doorway and he cursed, jerked
     it free, and disappeared.
    Fergus looked at his sisters lying beside him on the straw.
    The dead were always powerfully still, a fixity that could never be
     mimed.
    One summer, following cattle up on the booley, the mountain pasture, he
     had spent much of an afternoon staring at a dead fox, entranced by something he could
     not name. Dead shapes had a passion.
    Living on milk, charlock, and yellow meal, a herd saw
     no one for weeks, and the solitude up there had been tangible and exciting;