Read Online All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen - Free Book Online Page A

“Old Yves sounds a bit desperate. It’s quite the custom round here to proclaim your love on a rock. Remember all those names on the way up to La Tuque?”

    â€œWhat does it say, Daddy?”
    â€œIt says that he won’t stop loving her. Little vandal.”
    â€œWhat’s a vandal?”
    â€œA person who wears sandals and writes on walls.”
    â€œVandals in sandals.”
    â€œYes, and Goths in socks.”
    â€œVandals in sandals and Goths in socks, Goths in thocks. Thocks in Goths.”
    â€œDo you think we could open a window now? ” Bea’s voice was sharp. The brittle sound of the late summer leaves came to her. The locusts roared in the banks.
    â€œLooks like this is a dead end,” said her husband. “I guess your hunch was wrong.”
    â€œI guess it was, I’m sorry,” she said.
    â€œNo problemo, it’s a nice day to be out for a drive, isn’t it Cammy? In our sandals in the new vandal.”
    â€œVandal sandal candle dandle.” Cammy launched into the rest of the alphabet.
    The words fell like light blows. Bea endured them all. Surely, she thought, it won’t always be like this. They turned and drove back down the hill, past the swamp, past the empty branch where the heron had been, past the daisies, and back to the dumpsters at the bottom of the road.

Where the Corpse Weed Grows
    I SABELLA’S SKIRT BRUSHED through the ferns at the side of the track, collecting burrs, hooked seeds, the hem dusted yellow by the furry tongues of pollen-bearing plants. She had found the skirt in a costumes sale. Now what she needed was an old crone (she consulted the back of the park brochure) of Atikamekw ancestry, someone bent over, wise in the ways of plants and their healing powers, devoted to helping true seekers like herself. In the absence of a crone, the woman in the ticket booth said she would find a park warden at a hut called Espérance.
    Isabella wrinkled up her nose. She had so wanted to feel the quest with the whole of her body; to cross a boggy patch, sensing the step and suck of waterlogged ground, tripping on rocks and roots as she hunted for the plants. But the track resisted her. It remained gravelly and dry.
    A horsefly that had been buzzing around her went very quiet and Isabella hoped that it was not caught in her hair. She was beginning to regret not having removed the hair extensions after the show closed. They were much longer strands than her natural hair, tinted deep green, and now they seemed heavy and hot. The director wanted his Ophelia to look like she had
already been floating in the river for a while, because he said they were all ghosts, doomed from the beginning, and no one in the audience could pretend to be ignorant of how Hamlet turned out, so the audience, through their expectation, became complicit with the drive of tragedy. Whenever he said complicit (and he said it often) he passed his hand over the shaved crown of his head. The director was brilliant; Isabella adored him. She did anything that he asked her to do, anything at all.
    Isabella was always at a loose end between shows, which was why a personal quest seemed so attractive. It began with a pamphlet from the health-food store. The pamphlet described a herbal product called Elcarim, proclaiming its value as a potent cure for cancer. In the 1930s, a nurse had received the recipe from an Indian healer. She mixed and bottled huge batches of the stuff with which she healed the sick across the province. The pamphlet listed the plants used in the formula, describing how the nurse had given up the recipe in a sworn affidavit, extracted on her deathbed. Sworn affidavit. The phrase was so romantic. Isabella wanted to be that nurse.
    She decided to gather the ingredients and prepare the Elcarim herself. First she needed a trug to lay the plants in, and then there would be boiling and steeping, leaving the mixture in the dark, straining, reheating, and finally