The Wives of Bath Read Online Free PDF Page A

tailored charcoal suit and high heels, although her snub-nosed pumps were the kind of shoes Sal calls “serviceable.” Not the fancy kind, with toes so pointed you could kick out the eye of a snake. The little man’s feet were hidden inside a child’s pair of rubber boots. His overalls were kid-size too and he wore a Glengarry tam, or what the curlers in Madoc’s Landing call a bonspiel hat. Every so often he bent down and patted a little corgi dog who sat at his feet. He was a dwarf.
    Two figures stood nearby, a tall man, close to Morley’s height, whom I guessed was European because he had a long, wilted moustache, and the men who wore moustaches in Madoc’s Landing always came from Poland or someplace like that. He stood crouching over a wheelbarrow, handing chrysanthemums to a slender teenage boy in an old peaked hunting cap and khaki pants, who plopped the flowers into the freshly dug holes the older woman was digging. The boy looked gloriously wet and dirty.
    The tall woman spied us and stopped digging. Smiling, she heldup one of her palms to the heavens and I realized it had stopped drizzling, although the sun was nowhere in sight and the sky was still oyster-coloured behind the school’s moisture-soaked lawns and stone buildings. Morley and Sal waited awkwardly, as if they, too, were new girls, while the woman lurched over to us, taking a short cut through one of the flower beds, so that the heels of her sensible pumps sunk halfway into the earth.
    “Hello, cousin Morley.” She held out a large hand to Morley, who shook it shyly, shifting back and forth on the pavement from one wing tip to the other. “And this must be your new wife, Mrs. Bradford.” Her whispery voice sounded like the sulky voice of a girl. And yet the size of her made me think of a man. I looked at her curiously. Was she one of those creatures Sal calls a half-and-half? I’d never seen any man or woman quite like her. She was as big and round as a giant Toby jug, and I thought she looked the way Chaucer’s Wife of Bath might have looked if she had stepped into the twentieth century: broad in the behind and out for herself, and the rest of the world could go hang. I knew there was a special breed of women like this who lived outside the rules of men, and I guessed she was one of them, whether she loved women in private or not. She wore her white hair parted in the middle and held flat against her large head with a pair of child’s barrettes. In the back, it was twisted into a sausage roll that was kept in place by a black hairnet. Her suit was rumpled, the way my clothes look if I stay outdoors too long. Its jacket was cut too loosely around her large shoulders, and she hadn’t bothered to wipe off the chalk smudges I noticed on its cuffs. I could tell Sal didn’t know what to make of her, either, and I saw her move just a little closer to Morley.
    “Hello, Miss Vaughan,” Sal said nervously.
    “Call me Vera, Mrs. Bradford.” She saw Sal looking at her muddy heels and smiled. “If Sergeant would only use a spade properly, I wouldn’t have to ruin my Sunday shoes. But I can’thave him getting one of his backaches.” She chuckled, and Morley and Sal and I all made chuckling sounds, too.
    “Aye-aye! Only blisters.” The dwarf sauntered over to us, the corgi at his heels. The little dog capered twice round the tiny man, who made a funny, two-fingered salute at the headmistress behind her back, but she turned and scowled at him with her aggrieved, circle-ringed eyes. He stopped dead in his tracks and hung his head, and his little dog squatted down too, like Lady, our golden retriever, when Morley tells her to sit.
    “And you must be Mary,” the headmistress said, turning her back on the dwarf. “It’s always a pleasure to meet a member of the family.” I felt my chest tighten. I didn’t know how to answer her.
    “Mary Beatrice is very shy,” Sal said. “She won’t talk until she feels at home.”
    “I understand. I’m