What They Wanted Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough.”
    He tried to smile.
    “Seriously,” I whispered, my eyes filling with persuasion as he searched them out.
    Satisfied—else overcome with fatigue—his breathing deepened and he lapsed into sleep. Laying my palm against his cheek, I felt its roughness, almost tasting the salt from the days he straddled his boat in the stiff morning gales, hand-jigging codfish in the ways of old, face bared to the wind, legs anchored to the sea. How tall he’d stood those early mornings in Cooney Arm when he tossed me and sometimes Chris aboard with him. We’d squat in the stern, white-knuckled to the gunnels, as he rose against the sky, all big and black in his sou’wester and oilskins, doing his dance with the sea as he jigged: one hand up, one hand down, one hand up, one hand down, his hips swaying with the swell, his boat bucking with the lop. How strange his face looked now, all still and pale on that stark white pillow, his squinty eyes bereft of weather and so looking like death it was as if they knew what death was.
    And in a sense he did know what death was—or a form of death. From the moment he picked up his chainsaw and started his first summer in the woods he cursed over the sweltering heat away from the sea, and the flies, the gawddamn flies—blackflies, sandflies, mosquitoes—all swarming inside his nostrils, his ears, his eyes, and gawd-damn deer ticks gouging and breeding in his flesh. Many times I’d be hanging about the wharf when Father got home from the woods, and I’d listen to his cursing, and then Mother chiding him for his cursing, for his being wimpy over flies, for going straightaway out in boat with his nets when he’d already worked all day and hadn’t had supper yet, hadn’t washed, hadn’t fixed the latch on Gran’s door, hadn’t rested.
    “I gotta breathe,” he’d shoot over his shoulder, already pulling away from the wharf, “the heat, the heat, there’s no getting from the gawd-damn heat; can’t breathe, no wind, no air, no gawd-damn air.”
    “Give up the nets, give up the nets, Sylvanus, working yourself in the grave with them damn, bloody nets.”
    And on and on they would argue about his working the woods, his nets, and the handfuls of fish that were hardly worth his while. Till now. Till now, as usual, when Mother proved herself right.
    Chris reappeared from behind the curtain.
    “He’s sleeping,” I whispered.
    “Is he okay?”
    “I don’t know. You find Mom?”
    “I—no. I think I knows, though.”
    We fell silent, looking into the grey of our father’s face.
    Chris nudged me. “You want to go find her?”
    I nodded, but was unable to leave. “Hardly looks like him, do it?”
    “He looked worse yesterday.”
    “Imagine if he’d died.”
    He abruptly took my arm and led me back out through those heavy doors. I followed, sniffling quietly as he led us through a series of corridors. Mother was sitting in the front pew of a small chapel. She looked shrunken, her shoulders tiny like a girl’s. She was bent before a crucifix, her face the pallor of Father’s.
    Chris spoke her name. She rose, rushing towards him as she always did, as though he were a font from which she must drink. Unlike me, who she’d held aloof from birth. Small wonder. Three dead babies and me the fourth one born, small wonder she held me aloof. And then that “dark spell,” as Gran called it, the weeks and weeks of darkness that Mother succumbed to after my birth, so dark a spell that it bruised her skin in places and blocked her nipples from milking, I once heard her old friend Suze say.
    But I hadn’t fared bad. Gran brought me across the brook to her own house and fed me goat’s milk from a bottle, and such great comfort I was to that dear woman that when Mother started getting well, Gran pleaded to keep me. Which served them both, as Mother was soon pregnant again, and suffered morning sickness straight through to the last day of her pregnancy.
    Given that their houses were a