The Seventh Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

movement.
    When he is gone, I drop the pill into the oil spread I use to mix with my paints; I stir it with my brush, cleansing it while watching the pill dissolve, leaving its threads of blue amid the grey. I like that colour, but I stir and stir it until the blue has all gone into grey.
    Outside the world is not grey. Lightning dances, it prances tonight across the dark of our land like a battery light held in the old thunder giant’s hand.
    â€˜It’s down,’ Pa yells from the yard, as our lights go out.
    â€˜Frekin useless city bastards,’ Lenny screams now at the generator, the fence. ‘If they want me to keep her locked in then they’re going to have to supply something better. There’s got to be something better than frekin wire.’
    Feeble city tools; while Granny lived we lived free and had no need of a generator, nor was there wire enough in all of the new world to fence our land; she had owned the mountains and the flat land between the mountains. Now we have fences and not so much land and I am not free, for when the city fences sing I can not climb over, or through, nor can I crawl beneath the barbarous things.
    Some nights from my room I hear a fence rejoicing in its barbarity; such singing it makes when a night thing walks blindly into its wires. Wire melodies are created by the wanderer’s struggle, but the struggle is not long. Lenny kills the song and he sets the dogs free. Snarling starving beasts, they rip the entangled ones to shreds, appeasing their hunger on warm flesh, be it sowman or other beast. Perhaps it is better that way; better than to die slowly, welded to those wires, while the fence sings in celebration.
    Our house is on high land, halfway to the mountain top. That is why, when all else was washed away in the powerful flooding of the Great Ending, our house was not washed away and when the rains refused to come and all else died, many of our trees survived. Granny once told me that a swift creek was once born of the springs on Morgan Hill, where water still gushes hot from beneath the rocks. It keeps our tank full. Lenny and Pa walked there often, their giant water barrel drawn by a bullock. Now Lenny must walk there alone with his bullock, for since the grey men’s coming, Pa’s right leg will not carry him far.
    The fence cuts through the woods at the rear of our house. Beyond the woods, our land turns to rock and rises steeply, and up and up and up to Morgan Hill, which is a sacred place of many caves where ancient wanderers in those far distant times painted their pictures on rock walls.
    From the spring cave, where I once went with Granny to bathe in the waters, our house, with its tall roof and fine chimneys, appeared as a mirage from another world, a genteel lady transported to this time. Her long skirts held high, her pantalets down, she stood below us screaming without voice while black rats chewed at her dancing shoes.
    She is only a fine lady from a distance. Daily she is dying. At night her lace-work, still clinging to the front verandah, swings and cries like a captive wraith in the winds, while from the fire-gutted western rooms comes the slow whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of her aged blood striving to live longer, to protect those in her care for another day, another season.
    So many have lived and died on this land. The graveyard is full of them. When the storms come they awaken the dead who return to the house where they stand at broken windows, calling to me. I am not afraid of the house ghosts. I wave to them, bow low. They titter and laugh, and Granny’s laugh is loudest of all. She had a fine wild laugh.
    For forty years she lived in the city but only the tapestry travelled with her from that place. A huge thing, near big as a wall, it was woven by the many hands of the city females. Granny once said that the sisterhood had sat in a circle, stitching in the threads that trap forever the brown rabbit, the red and white hounds and