Read Online After This by Alice McDermott - Free Book Online

same to their mother, who
was already standing beside her bed, tying her robe at the narrowest
place left to her, high up on her belly and just under her breasts. He
lifted their sister from her bed and carried her downstairs over his
shoulder. Even in the peripheral light (Michael had asked to carry the
flashlight but his mother had taken it instead, and Jacob’s hand), it
was clear that she was only pretending to still be asleep—her eyelids
fluttered, there was the smallest shape of a smile. Herding them all
toward the basement, their father paused at the dining-room window,
pulled back the curtain and shone the beam through the window and
out into the darkness until it caught the yawning base of the doomed
tree.
    After only a quick glimpse, a glimpse that was like a gulp of foul
air, Jacob pulled at his mother’s hand to draw her to safety. But
Michael lingered, and even Annie squirmed out of her father’s arms to
stand by the window, her two hands on the painted sill. The roots
reared out of the black ground, the trunk leaned and then
straightened, the long branches swung this way and that. Their
mother patted Jacob’s hand to soothe him. On their way through the
kitchen she took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and the
remaining paper cups from their picnic. They followed their father’s
flashlight down the wooden steps. It was a tunnel of light and it
seemed to draw all the surrounding shadows to its edge. Only Michael
walked alone although, at one point, as they made their way down the
stairs, he touched his fingers to the back of Jacob’s neck and made him
jump. They sat together on the old couch that was just the other side
of the toy-train table. Their mother between the two boys to avoid
trouble, Annie on her father’s lap. The washing machine and the sink
and the long string of the clothesline where she hung clothes in bad
weather were just behind them, each illuminated, however dimly, by
the blue light of the storm at the narrow windows. Around their own
circle of light, their mother said, “Let’s say an Angel of God,” the
bodies of her two boys pressed against her. “Angel of God,” they said,
following her voice. “My guardian dear, to whom God’s love, commits
me here, ever this night, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and
guide. Amen.”
    And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then
what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like
something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees
up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms
around her father’s neck. “There went the tree,” he said.
In the small circle of the flashlight, their mother poured milk into
the paper cups and carefully handed them to the children.

W

HEN JOHN AND MARY KEANE said “during the war,” their children
imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand
passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what
might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a
storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the
world itself, had emerged from that shadow.
    During the war, their father said, we sometimes slept in people’s
cellars. France, Belgium, into Germany. (The milk in the paper cups
smelled like candles, like the small votives they lit in church.)
Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed.
Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were
old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled
with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.
    Once, three or four of them had taken shelter for the night, in the
cellar of an abandoned farmhouse—it was maybe late ’44 or early
’45—and when the sun came up (not a sun, really, as he recalled it,
only darkness turning to pale gray) they realized a new guy, a
replacement, had joined them during the night. He just