The Taker Read Online Free PDF Page B

in heaven that would stop me from loving Jonathan. If anything, it made me see that he, too, had his enemies and detractors, that he, too, was constantly judged, and that he needed me. I was the one friend with whom he could be free. And it was not one-sided: to speak plainly, Jonathan was the only person who treated me as though I mattered. And to have the attention of the most desired, most important boy in town is no small thing to a girl nearly invisible among her peers. How could that help but make me love him even more?
    And I told Jonathan as much the following Sunday, when I went up to him and slipped my arm under his as he paced about on the far side of the green. “My brother is a fool,” was all I said, and we continued walking together without another word between us.
    The one thing I did not take back from our conversation at the church social was that I’d rather have been born a boy. I still believed that. It had been drummed into my head, by the things my parents did and the very rules by which we lived, that girls were not as valuable as boys and that our lives were destined to be far less consequential. For instance, Nevin would inherit the farm from my father, but if he hadn’t the temperament or inclination to raise cattle, he might be apprenticed to the blacksmith or sent to work as a logger for the St. Andrews—he had choices, albeit limited ones. As a woman, I had fewer options: marry and start my own household, remain at home and assist my parents, or work as a servant in someone else’s home. If Nevin rejected the farm for some reason, conceivably my parents could pass it along to one of their daughters’ husbands, but that, too, would depend on the husband’s preferences. A good husband would take his wife’s wishes into consideration, but not all of them did.
    The other reason—the more important one, in my view—was that if I were a boy, it would be so much easier to be Jonathan’s friend. The things we could do together if I were not a girl! We could ride horseback and go off on adventures without chaperones. We could spend lots of time in each other’s company without anyone raising an eyebrow or finding it a fit topic to remark upon. Our friendship would be so banal and so ordinary that it would merit no scrutiny and would be allowed to proceed on its own.
    Looking back, I understand now that this was a difficult time for me, still caught up in adolescence but stumbling toward maturity. There were things I wanted from Jonathan, but I could not yet put a name to them and had only the clumsy framework of childhood to measure them against. I was close to him but wanted to be closer in a way Ididn’t understand. I saw the way he looked at the older girls, and that he behaved differently with them than he did with me, and I thought I might die of jealousy. Partly, this was due to the intensity of Jonathan’s attention, his great charm; when he was with you, he had a way of making you feel that you were the center of his world. His eyes, those bottomless dark eyes, would settle on your face, and it was as though he was there for you and you alone. Perhaps that was an illusion, perhaps it was merely the joy of having Jonathan to oneself. In any case, the result was the same: when Jonathan withdrew his attention, it was as though the sun slipped behind a cloud and a cold, sharp wind blew at your back. All you wanted was for Jonathan to come back, to enjoy his attention again.
    And he was changing with every year. When his guard was down, I saw aspects of him that I hadn’t seen (or noticed) before. He could act crudely, particularly if he thought no woman was observing him. He would display some of the rough behavior of the axmen who worked for his father, speak coarsely of women as though he was already acquainted with the full range of intimacies possible between the sexes. Later I would learn that by age sixteen he had been seduced and gone on to seduce others, a participant