The O'Briens Read Online Free PDF Page B

God bless you,” the priest whispered.
    â€œAnd you, Father.”
    The old man shuffled a few more steps, then laid his head on Joe’s shoulder and began to sob. Holding him, Joe felt the priest’s frailty, and in his own throat he felt a metallic soreness, which he reckoned must be love. He kissed the old man, and then they all bowed their heads to receive his blessing; Joe could hear the teamster outside stamping his boots impatiently and the horses whinnying for more hay.
    They made one more stop, at the Catholic cemetery. The inscription on the granite slab Joe had ordered and paid for gave the facts of his parents’ lives. Facts were all that were suitable for stone; anything else seemed vain and vainglorious. Their father’s birth date wasn’t mentioned because they didn’t know it.
    Ellenora Scanlon O’Brien,
    Born 1870 Died 29 th April 1904
    Wife of
    Miceál O’Brien,
    Died 1900
    Buried in S. Africa
    The girls placed handfuls of tiny, pale wildflowers on the grave, and then they all climbed back aboard. They were only a couple of miles farther along when Joe heard the caw of a fiddle — and there was Mick Heaney stumbling out of the bush, a rancid grin on his face, plucking and sawing the instrument held in the crook of his arm.
    Joe ordered the teamster to pick up the pace, but the man complained of heavy mud and said he wouldn’t be winding his horses for the sake of a two-dollar trip. Joe was furious — with the teamster, with Mick Heaney, and most of all with himself for not burning the old place down to a heap of black char, broken glass, and ashes when he’d had the chance, because now he realized that Mick Heaney would saunter back to the clearing and dig himself in, selling timothy hay off their meadow, gathering berries from bushes they had tended and fertilized, shaking apples off their trees, living to a fetid old age pickled in raw whisky, and probably dying in the bed their mother had died in.
    Fiddling furiously, Mick stumbled after the wagon. Joe yearned to throw something at him but there was nothing at hand. If he’d kept his rifle he might have issued a warning shot, sent a bullet snapping past his stepfather’s ear, but the rifle had been sold along with everything else. He thought of jumping down to deliver another thrashing, but the teamster would spread the story — Heaney and O’Brien! Battling in the mud like a pair of roosters! — and Joe hated the thought of people laughing at him after he was gone. He struggled to contain his anger. No use dirtying his boots and staining the turn-ups of his trousers with the mud of the Pontiac, which he meant to escape cleanly, and forever.
    Instead of looking back he studied his brothers and sisters. The Little Priest was reading a novel by Joseph Conrad; Sojer Boy had slipped off his kid gloves and was cleaning his fingernails with a bit of straw. Kate and Hope were chatting with the teamster. It was suddenly clear to him that his siblings did not share his sense of deprivation, or the fury that was inside him. The strains of“Bonaparte’s Retreat”gripped and taunted him, but to them the bleating, yapping fiddle was just the noise of something they were leaving behind. It had no claim on them. It was already slipping past, like the thin breeze and the stink of muskeg.
    When he next looked back Mick had fallen a long way behind. The tune had faded like old snow deep in the woods in April. After another quarter-mile he couldn’t hear anything, and when he looked back once more, there was nothing but trees, mud, and sky.
    ~
    On the platform at Union Station in Ottawa they huddled together, sharing for the last time a sense of belonging to each other. He and the Little Priest were ticketed for New York with a change at Montreal, and their train was leaving immediately. Grattan would be escorting Hope and Kate to the Visitations, then catching an evening train for