The Witch Read Online Free PDF

from the evening’s dishwashing, belled out around her.
    â€œMrs. Wojo?” Kerry piped up then. “Do you have any kids? You know, your own?”
    She stopped her swaying and opened her eyes. I waited for her to blow up with rage, but she walked past us and into the dining room.
    We heard her opening and shutting drawers in the big glass-fronted buffet that held her collection of ceremonial china. When she came back in, she was holding a boxlike object in gold metal. It had a latch in the center that Mrs. Wojo workedopen, splitting it into two framed portraits. She set them down on the table in front of us so we could see.
    â€œThat’s him,” she said. “That’s my Frank. Go ahead, you can look at him.”
    There were two color pictures, one of a fat-faced baby wrapped in a blue blanket, the other a boy a year or two older than Kerry. He was posed in the front yard of Mrs. Wojo’s house, a weedy kid in google-eyed glasses. He was wearing shorts and a peculiar shirt, buttoned up tight beneath his chin and with stiff, oversized sleeves that stood away from his thin arms. The photographer had forgotten to tell him to smile. He looked like a kid we wouldn’t want to play with.
    We looked from one picture to the other. What were we supposed to say about him?
    â€œWhere is he?” I asked.
    â€œIn heaven.”
    Mrs. Wojo coughed and sniffled. “My baby. He’s an angel now.”
    I stared at Frank’s blurry eyes behind their glasses. I felt a little sick.
    â€œSo what happened?” Kerry asked. He must not have been as afraid of her now that he was her favorite.
    Mrs. Wojo picked up the portrait frame and snapped it shut. “Polio. Do you know what that is? Well, there used to be this disease. A lot of children came down with it. Every summer there’d be what they call an epidemic, children all over, one day they’re fine, the next, they’re cripples. You know what cripples are, don’t you?
    â€œIt started out like the flu, with a fever and a sore throat and whatnot, and then pains, pains all over. And once it gotbad it paralyzed them so’s their legs would be all twisted up and they couldn’t walk. All these little children in leg braces, using crutches. Sometimes it went to the muscles that make you breathe and they wouldn’t work right and the children had to be put into what they called an iron lung machine, a big metal tube that did their breathing for them, and they had to stay inside it for the rest of their lives.”
    I tried not breathing. I saw the iron lung machine in my mind. The metal tube puffed in and out with a whoosh and a clang. There was a whole room of them, and inside each one was a child, and each child was pale and shriveled and growing old.
    â€œMy poor Frankie. He caught the virus from going swimming at the public pool. He came home with an earache and he didn’t want his supper, and that night he woke up screaming and screaming. His stomach hurt him and then his back and then his legs. He had seizures where he went blank in the head and his poor little body almost lifted off the mattress.”
    Mrs. Wojo was in the grip of her story now. Her useless eyes were lifted to the ceiling, seeing the long-ago. You would have thought it was all too awful to remember, but she took some kind of energy from it, the testament of suffering. “He went to the hospital, to the ward with the other polio children. They put steamed wool blankets over him and rubbed him down with arnica. The virus went to pneumonia, his lungs filled up with water. For a night and a day he choked on his own insides. Then the life went out of him and he was at peace. He’s buried up at Queen of Heaven Cemetery, with a statue of the Archangel Raphael, the Healer.”
    She reached the end of her story and lowered her gaze to us. “Did anybody bother to get you two your vaccinations? I’ll have to ask.”
    That night in bed