The Memento Read Online Free PDF Page A

and curse. Suddenly he dropped the reins and left his horses there hitched to the weights and come running and started pounding away on his brother. Blood was flying and people was screaming and taking their kids. Clyde would have these fits of rage and they’d only last a few minutes and he’d have no memory. His sore bloodied knuckles and the police would tell him the tale of what he done. When Hector got older he started to be just like his father. You see, what runs in the blood runs in the blood.
    When Loretta came out of the school Hector was telling us a story about his father chasing the workhorses when they got out of the barn because he forgot to close their stalls, and how he heard his father calling to them, Lloyd, Floyd, Harold and Jim. They had boy names, Hector said, because Clyde viewed them horses as his true sons. Loretta was with a policeman and he walked her to the car. Hector opened the door for her and the policeman called Hector by name. His troubles with the police had started when he was just a boy. Hector helped Loretta into the car and closed the door, tipping his hat to the policeman, and off we went through the valley and up the mountain.
    We drove toward the mountain and Loretta discussed her summer plans for us as though Ma had never come to the school, like it was just a normal June day. She and Hector began their regular good-natured bickering about household matters, making the odd comment to Art, who also seemed happy to pretend nothing had happened. The breeze floating in through the windows smelled of fresh-cut grass. I tried to make sense of what had just happened. Ma had just picked right up from that night in the spring.
    Once details between Ma and Loretta had been finalized, I’d ridden my bicycle over from Petal’s End one evening after supper. It was a beautiful spring night. Ma’s house was painted different colours because she could only afford to buy the discontinued paint, the leftover cans. My mother greeted me at the door without any of her usual makeup on, not a bit of jewellery. She was in a ratty bathrobe and her hair was in curlers that looked like they’d been in there for a few days. She had that odour of smoke and booze and hairspray, and her hand shook when she lifted it from the doorknob. I asked her where Ronnie was and she said he had to go off and haul some flowers, she had the dates mixed up. She hugged me, too tightly, and tried to keep from crying.
    “Oh, Fancy,” she said, “I’m a bad mother. I baked for you but it didn’t turn out so well, Honeysuckle.”
    “You’re not so bad,” I said. “No one can stitch like you, Mama.” She was a horrible-looking mess. I put my arm around her and took her inside. She sat in a chair picking at her fingernails while I put the kettle on.
    “Well, you can stitch like you was born with a needle in your hand, Fancy Mosher, and you ain’t even twelve years old. Almost but not quite,” she said.
    We ate the cookies she’d made. She had forgotten to put sugar or baking powder in them and they were flat and bitter. I knew she’d used a cookie cutter, a steel bird-shaped one, because it wason the counter, but the shapes were all wrong from her hand shaking so. They was birds that would never fly.
    We was out on the screened-in verandah after and the embroidery picture Ma was working on was stretched in her hoop on the table by her chair. I had brought my hoop along, a night garden by a pond with tall swooping willows and water lilies. Ma picked up her embroidery. She pretended she didn’t notice me watching as she started slowly pulling the mauve thread through, colour Ma was putting into the sunset sky behind the green floss treetops. She was making a flock of dark birds swooping through the sky with one split stitch after another and, unlike her cookies, those stitched birds looked like they would always be flying.
    While she’d drink cheap wine and dirty-tasting gin, Ma only used the finest silk flosses for