Read Online After This by Alice McDermott - Free Book Online Page B

was pleasant, to be in the basement like this, with
her family, in the middle of the night. She looked across Jacob’s dark
hair to her husband, who still had Annie’s thin arms wrapped around
his neck. She doubted, thinking back, that she had said, straight off,
That’s a Jewish name—or perhaps she did not doubt it as much as
regret it, since it had become, in the intervening
     
years, Jacob’s name alone, the name of her own boy, the Jacob from
the war having become, in the intervening years, poor kid, mostly
forgotten.
     
Much as she had forgotten, already, what it was that had brought
him to mind tonight, that other Jacob. Was it the storm itself? The
banging at the door? The young fireman, appearing like a guardian
angel to warn them that the lights were out and trees were falling all
over the neighborhood?
     
She wondered briefly if her husband should have told the children
this particular war story at all. Michael would surely use it against his
brother. There was always the possibility of bad dreams.
     
If he had wanted to tell the children the story he might simply
have said that he and the boy had sung vaudeville tunes together, in
the middle of a war. Gallagher and Shean. Mutt and Jeff. Catholic and
Jew. Fresh-faced replacement and aging veteran, tramping through the
cold, singing. He could have left it at that. He could have left out the
fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another
life entirely still before him. This one.
     
With her arms around her sons and the new baby curled against
her rib cage, her husband and her daughter a mere arm’s length away,
and the storm turning from them even as the sun was surely
approaching, Mary Keane considered the wisdom of leaving certain,
difficult things unsaid. She considered the wisdom of the Blessed
Mother who, as the Christmas gospel told it, pondered everything in
her heart.
     
Gently, she collected the children’s cups. With her silence alone
she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was
over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was
given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their
father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let
them linger.

T

HE TINY SPIDERS that lived in the higher branches of the downed
tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of
the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright
     
red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of
     
them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green
     
wood, the tender leaves and pliant branches, on their skin and in their
     
clothes. Mr. Persichetti, standing at the top of the three steps, the
     
borrowed truck with the new chain saw just behind him, saw Tony, his
     
own son, moving among the fallen branches as if through a jungle.
     
Tony wore a plastic combat helmet and carried a toy pistol. He was
     
thirteen, three years older than the oldest Keane boy, and Mr.
     
Persichetti wondered if he wasn’t too old for such playacting. He
     
resolved, even before Mrs. Keane had agreed to let him do the job, that
     
he’d get the boy to help out tomorrow afternoon, hauling the thin
     
branches and the smaller slices of tree trunk. He was asking twenty
     
dollars—not an exorbitant amount. Some of the women in the
     
neighborhood merely spoke to him from behind their storm doors, but
     
Mrs. Keane opened hers and invited him in. He stood in the small
     
vestibule. She wore a maternity dress with a bow at the neckline and
     
bedroom slippers. She seemed pale and somewhat puffy, not what
     
you’d call a good-looking woman from the start, but she had a direct
     
and friendly manner that encouraged
     
him to say he had been inspired by the storm to make better use of his
free days. He’d been on construction crews in the army. South Pacific.
He knew how to handle a chain saw