Read Online A Boy of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews - Free Book Online Page B

spring night she had stayed at her lover’s place under the pretext that the roads were too treacherous to get back to Algren. The next day she returned home to find Max, her baby, just about frozen to death, lying unconscious and bruised on the kitchen floor—her husband beside him, dead and covered with logs. Apparently he had had an epileptic seizure while trying to fire up the woodstove, dropped Max, whom he had been carrying in one arm, fallen down and died right there. After that Combine Jo started eating and drinking and swearing and generally raising hell all over Algren, until she became too fat and alcoholic to easily make her way out of her house.
    With all the money left to her and Max in her husband’s will, and by selling most of the farm, Combine Jo was able to hire enough people to look after Max when he was little, and bring her food and booze. She got the name Combine Jo not because she was as big as one, but because each spring she would take her husband’s old combine out of the barn and driveit up and down Algren’s Main Street as a personal spring-seeding celebration. Dory thought that Combine Jo might carry a sawed-off rifle in the cab of the combine, but nobody knew for sure. She would career down the street, one hand on the wheel, the other clamped around her bottle of Wild Turkey. She would then drive the combine to her husband’s grave, often right up over it, and enjoy a toast with him. She’d pour half a bottle of bourbon into the grass on top of his grave, light a cigarette and prop it up, as best she could, in the grass around where his head would have been, six feet under, and then she’d lie there beside him, where she felt she belonged.
    Combine Jo had loved her husband deeply. The affair had been a stupid distraction, a way to pass the time while her husband farmed night and day. Knute wondered if Jo had ever given Max any advice on love. Maybe she’d told Max to leave town when she found out Knute was pregnant. Maybe it wasn’t his idea at all. Maybe Jo gave Max a million bucks to leave. Maybe I’m a complete idiot, thought Knute.
    If she thought he had left because Jo had told him to, she was fooling herself. And her telling him to get lost the day that she found out she was pregnant and he hadn’t seemed happy enough—happy at all, really—wouldn’t have been enough for him to leave, either. Knute was always telling him to get lost, knowing he’d come back.
    No, Max had left because he’d wanted to leave. And now he was coming back because he wanted to come back, and he wanted to see his “goddamned daughter.”
    “Well,” Knute concluded, “Fuck him.”
    That same evening, Lorna had come out to Algren on the bus to visit Hosea. When Hosea got home from work he had listened to her message on the machine. And then he had listened to itagain, sitting on his couch, still in his coat and dripping water from his boots on to the living room carpet. “Hi, Hose,” she’d said. “Are you there? If you’re there, pick up the phone.” Hosea smiled. Doesn’t she know me better? he thought. Hosea had nearly killed himself a couple of times running for the phone when he’d heard Lorna’s voice coming over the machine. “Okay, I guess you’re not there.” Lorna wouldn’t call Hosea at work. She used to, at the beginning of their relationship, but after a while she had told him he always sounded distracted at work and she didn’t need to call long distance to get the cold shoulder. Hosea had pleaded with her to understand. He was the mayor, after all, of Canada’s smallest town. He had work to do. He loved her more than life itself but … But no, Lorna was unmoved. And since then had called him only at home. “Our office is closed tomorrow so I thought I’d come on the bus and stay over and you could take me home the next day or the next, or I’ll just take the bus again. Okay. Whatever. You’re really not there, are you? Hmmm. Okay, call me, but if you get this