The Ravine Read Online Free PDF Page A

night, far past the hour when normal families ate dinner.
    Uncle Johnny kept backing up the little flight of stairs, and I saw that he hugged to his chest a burnished wooden box that held a dark glass eye. I had, of course, seen television sets before (all of the neighbours owned one) but never, I don’t know, held aloft or something. The image of this television, obscured as it was by my uncle’s broad back, burned itself into my eyes. Even now I can see the dial and read the numbers; I can remember wondering why there was no “1.”
    Having achieved the kitchen, Uncle Johnny turned left and headed for the living room. That’s all there was to the ground floor of my childhood home, a kitchen and a living room. As the television turned, I saw that Uncle Johnny’s assistant in the moving process was my Aunt Jane, a tiny woman who was surprisingly strong.
    My mother moved forward and, although I’m certain she only meant to assist her sister-in-law, what she did in fact was shoulder Aunt Jane into the wall, quickly grabbing the back end of the television set before it plummeted to the ground.
    I fished out another piece of macaroni. The noodles were ready, so I turned off the heat and moved the pot aside. I knew that by the time cheese arrived (my mother was distracted enough without there being an actual distraction) the noodles would be mush. Unless I drained the noodles right then, in which case they would be cold. Either way, it was going to be another typical family meal, inedible to everyone but a stout little lad such as myself.
    “Hi, Philip,” said Aunt Jane.
    My Aunt Jane made me nervous. It was almost as though I knew that in five years she was going to be the first woman I ever saw naked. (I barged into the washroom at their home on Christmas Day; Aunt Jane was staring at her denuded self in the full-length mirror. I’ll never know why she was naked in the afternoon with a turkey roasting in the oven, but it was a fine gift to give a thirteen-year-old boy.) I stirred uneasily and said, “Hi,” but I am not certain that any sound came out.
    “We’ve brought you a television set,” said Aunt Jane, which was the kind of declarative statement she favoured. She had tiny features that were clustered together near the centre of her face.
    “Not just any television set,” shouted Uncle Johnny from the living room, “but a goddam
deluxe
television set!”
    Through the service bay, I could see that my mother and her brother had placed the set in the farthest corner, beside the sliding glass doors that opened onto the backyard. My mother took a step back and held her hand to her chin; something, clearly, was not right. Uncle Johnny held the electrical cord in one hand and was searching for some place to plug it in.
    It occurred to my mother what was amiss, and she returned to the kitchen for her free-standing ashtray. She saw that the pot’s boiling had been quieted, so she took a moment to hurl the noodles into the waiting colander.
    A cold meal, then.
Fine.
    My uncle had spied a power source deep in the room’s corner, and his wide keister was occupying much of the shadow over there as, on hands and knees, he poked around with the plug and tried to make a connection. I don’t know why our living room was so gloomy, especially since almost all of one wall was made up of the sliding glass doors. It’s not as though outside there were towering buildings, or even other modest houses, plunging our home into shadow. Past our backyard was a ditch and a field that spread out in all directions. To the left there was the schoolhouse, to the right the church, but they were both hundreds of yards distant. Why sunlight never managed to light our pale green carpeting is something of a mystery.
    Uncle Johnny straightened up laboriously (he’d been a football star in high school, but this hardly rendered him limber in his adulthood; his body was possessed by cramps and creaks) and turned a knob. After a crisp click, a