The O'Briens Read Online Free PDF Page A

for staying put, counting up, waiting. The whole country locked down under a kind of mystery.
    â€œYou next, Little Priest. Everyone must take a crack,” Joe said.
    Tom stopped scratching the ground with his boot and gazed down at their stepfather. On the porch the two girls had clasped hands.
    â€œGo on. Give him one, but hard.”
    But Tom still hesitated.
    Joe squatted, seizing a handful of Mick’s hair. “Listen to me. Touch any one of us, and we’ll do you worse and worse. We’ll cut off your old pecker and put it up your nose.”
    Tom suppressed a wild giggle as Joe stood up.
    â€œNow.”
    Tom stepped forward suddenly and booted Mick in his haunches. Mick screamed.
    â€œNot hard enough,” Joe said. “Now you, Sojer Boy. Give it to him good.”
    Grattan’s kick was powerful enough to flop Mick over on his back, where he lay groaning and rubbing his face with his bound wrists in what looked like a pantomime of someone waking from a deep sleep.
    â€œLet me try again, Joe,” Tom said. “I didn’t really get much of a piece of him.”
    Pig killing began that way. Slowly, almost shyly. Smoke and steam and nippy air. The tang of steel knives being honed. And ended, always, with frenzy, laughter and shouting, and black blood soaking the ground.
    â€œHold on until we get him in the shed,” Joe said.
    Mick was snuffling again.
    â€œCry all you want,” Joe told him. “You’ll still get what’s coming.”
    Seizing Mick under his scrawny shoulders, Joe and Grattan began dragging him towards the barn while Tom ran ahead to let the cow out. They laid him down on the straw and shit, then picked up their axe handles and hefted them.
    Joe struck first, then the others. Each blow made a smacking sound, like water bursting on rocks. Joe could hear his brothers breathing hard and see their breath fluting in the damp, chilly air. Tom was giggling and crying at the same time. Not all that different from a pig killing.
    â€œThat’s enough,” Joe said finally. “Stop.”
    Mick lay gurgling in the straw, lips split like overripe berries. Pink blood foamed at his nostrils. He had soiled himself, and the air stank of excrement and blood. Reaching down, Joe seized Mick’s wet shirtfront. The backs of his hands had green bruises, big as walnuts. He was weeping.
    Standing in the muddy shed with the rain hissing outside and his stepfather flopping like a broken bird at his feet, Joe felt a heightened awareness of the world, its patterns of noise, light, and smell, and at the same time he saw his life’s path with new clarity and vivacity. He would not stay in this country, this forest, the watershed of the Ottawa. It was dark and restricted. He would head out west and take some position — junior clerk, say, or assistant purchasing agent — with one of the big railway contractors. Studying the business from the inside, he would see how money — eighty-five thousand per mile! — flowed through a big undertaking. Once he had learned the courses and channels money took, identified the dams and floods and leaks, he could assemble his own combination of men, money, machinery, and take on such works himself. Running timber gangs in the bush — sixty rugged fellows, half of them without a word of English — had taught him how to organize men, get the job done, and see a profit, always.
    And out there he must find a sort of woman who was a better, finer person than he was, and win her somehow, make himself live up to her beauty and ideals and protect her and the family they would make together. He’d spend his love on her and their children, be profligate with love, and she would teach him all sorts of fine, delicate, harmonious things.
    Ashling was his mother’s word for a strong vision, the kind that came at you, slightly disordered, at moments when you were living on your feelings because you had nothing