The O'Briens Read Online Free PDF

else to go by, when you’d stepped outside the rules and the regular tempo of life.
    â€œHear me now, you old buzzard.” Joe slapped him until Mick stopped snuffling. “Come after us, lay a hand on any one in this family, I’ll kill you and burn what’s left on the trash heap, understand?”
    Pulling off the harness strap, Joe threw it over a nail. Then, using his father’s knife, he cut the cords binding Mick’s hands and feet. They left him lying on the straw. Once they were outside, Joe herded his brothers towards the cabin.
    â€œDo you think the fellow’s alive, Joe?”
    â€œDid we kill him?”
    â€œI don’t know and don’t much care.”
    Joe sent the girls into their mother’s room. Then he put the big kettle on the stove and he and his brothers stripped off their clothes. They were not accustomed to bathing in the morning, but all three stood together in the copper tub and scrubbed each other’s backs. Joe and Grattan took turns sluicing the warm water over their heads. When he was clean and dry, Joe went out with a pail of water, a towel, a shirt, and twenty dollars he intended to give Mick, along with a warning to never again show his face. But the fiddle was gone from the porch and Mick was gone from the shed, leaving nothing behind but blood and straw.
    ~
    Ellenora died in late April, hemorrhaging and coughing blood. The girls washed the body and scrubbed the room, and that evening Joe went in to take his turn standing by the bed where the long, narrow frame of their mother lay, rosary beads twined through her fingers. Her face was yellow and lined, and it seemed to him that every part of her had shrunken except the nose and ears.
    He had seen men nearly killed in fights and logging accidents, but his mother’s was the first corpse he had seen, and apart from its stillness what struck him was how fragile, insubstantial, and temporary her body seemed. Ellenora’s struggles and losses, her hard work and suffering, had developed from meagre flesh and sinew, a collection of fragile bones. It seemed extraordinary that a body could house the energy a mind produced, the secret powers to love and hate, forget and remember.
    No one was interested in buying the farm in the clearing at any price. Joe sold the livestock and equipment at auction, plus his wall tents, cookstoves, and logging tools. He split the proceeds among his brothers and sisters but kept the profits his pulpwood operation had made, the seed of another business that must eventually stand behind them all.
    Hope and Kate were bound for the Visitations in Ottawa. Grattan had a job offer from a wealthy Santa Barbara citrus grower, a benefactor of Father Lillis’s Franciscans. Joe would accompany Tom to the Bronx and see him settled at Fordham, then head for Calgary via Chicago, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg.
    On the morning they were all due to leave, Joe went out early and set fire to his little shed, then stood watching it burn to the ground with everything — ledgers, eyeshade, snowshoes, ink bottle — inside. He had wanted to burn the house down as well, but the others begged him not to. They were thinking they’d come back some day. Joe thought they wouldn’t — who returns willingly to a place of sorrow? — but the place was still standing when they left in a hired wagon, the girls up front with the teamster, the brothers on straw bales, all of them wearing yellow kid gloves Joe had bought for a going-away present.
    They stopped at the priest’s house for breakfast. After the buckwheat pancakes, gooseberry jam, and hot, sweet coffee, Father Lillis asked Mme Painchaud to crank up the Victrola, and as the waltz poured from the horn — to Joe it sounded like a twitter of birdsong mixed into a rushing, galloping rhythm of panicked horses — they each took a turn flying around the room in the arms of the old priest.
    Joe was last.
    â€œGod bless you,