Read Online A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston - Free Book Online

other room.
    When Landish spoke with the nuns who were nurses too, he was always sober and unLandishly polite, so time after time they went away, but each time seeming more reluctant than before. Landish feared that one day the nuns who were nurses too would tell him they had come to take the boy. He wasn’t sure what he should do.
    He tried again to find a job, but scarce to the point of non-existence were employers who were unaware of both the Sartorial Charter and his reputation, the latter best summed up by one of the bishops who said he would rather choose his teachers from among God-fearing grade-school dropouts than from among men who, though they had gone to Princeton, lived like Landish.
    Though Landish grew used to having Deacon on his shoulders, he tried everything he could to convince the boy to walk more often, short of punishing him or threatening to punish him or even getting angry with him, none of which he could bear to do. He had nothing he could bribe him with.
    “It’s better up high,” Deacon said. When he was tired, he would rest his head sideways on Landish’s, entwine his arms up to the elbows in his hair, and go to sleep.
    They walked for hours because there was not much else to do.
    They wandered one night into the better neighbourhoods where there was electric lighting.
    “Their lights go out every time there’s a storm of wind,” Landish said. “Then they have to use what we use in the attic.”
    Deacon nodded.
    “My father’s house has electric lights,” Landish said. “We got electricity long before I went to Princeton.”
    “You don’t have it now.”
    “No.”
    “But you wish you did.”
    “Not really.”
    “Are electric lights nicer?”
    “You don’t have to keep them lit like you do with oil and coal and wood and candlesticks. Less work. Cleaner. They don’t have any smell.”
    “But smoke smells nice.”
    “That’s right.”
    Landish told him that electricity ran through the wires that were strung from pole to pole along the streets, and from the poles to the houses.
    They heard the wires humming when the wind was calm.
    Electricity ran like water did through pipes, Landish said. It flowed.
    There were no poles or wires or even gas lamps on Dark Marsh Road.
    One day Landish told him that a woman named Lucy would mind him for a while. Landish said that he was going for a walk with Lucy’s sister. Landish went down the stairs when Lucy was coming up. They didn’t say hello or look at each other. Landish was gone for an hour. Lucy had a wooden ballerina spinning top, painted white and red. They sat on the floor and the ballerina spun back and forth between them, one hand on her head, one arm stretched out. Lucy lay back on the floor and fell asleep until she heard Landish’s footsteps on the stairs. Sometimes Lucy’s sister, Irene, minded Deacon. She spun the ballerina too, but she talked more than Lucy and smoothed back Deacon’s hair.
    The “compensation” from Van was long gone. It seemed clear that, despite Van’s promise, no further compensation would arrive. Landish vowed that he would hold out as long as he could before acceptingtop-ups. That summer, by charging less than anyone else, he managed to find piecework here and there, digging holes for fence posts, clearing and burning brush. He was often paid in food from the gardens of his employers. He made mash from blight-blackened potatoes and called it “spudding.” Mimicking Deacon’s pronunciation, he called his rabbit recipe “rabid stew.” He made it from rabbits that he snared at the end of Dark Marsh Road. He made “turnip your nose.” He also made “homophone soup,” which was yellow pea.
    He made cabbage à deux, shredding the cabbage and mixing it with thrice-soaked, thrice-baked, hard-boiled beans. It was one of Deacon’s favourites. They went outside and walked for a long time after eating it, “venting their gustations,” Landish said, which Deacon said was just a fancy way of