Read Online Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online

solemn-faced, with a moustache and an eye-patch; up close, a collection of black dots. I back away from him to see if he’ll come into focus—I try to catch his good eye—but he’s not looking at me; he’s looking towards the horizon, with his spine straight and his shoulders back, as if he’s facing a firing squad. Stalwart, you’d say.
    Then a shot of the button factory itself, in 1911, says the caption. Machines with clanking arms like the legs of grasshoppers, and steel cogs and tooth-covered wheels, and stamping pistons going up and down, punching out the shapes; long tables with their rows of workers, bending forward, doing things with their hands. The machines are run by men, in eyeshades and vests, their sleeves rolled up; the workers at the table are women, in upswept hairdos and pinafores. It was the women who counted the buttons and boxed them, or sewed them onto cards with the Chase name printed across them, six or eight or twelve buttons to a card.
    Down at the end of the cobblestoned open space is a bar, The Whole Enchilada, with live music on Saturdays, and beer said to be from local micro-breweries. The decor is wooden tabletops placed on barrels, with early-days pine booths along one side. On the menu, displayed in the window—I’ve never gone inside—are foods I find exotic: patty melts, potato skins, nachos. The fat-drenched staples of the less respectable young, or so I’m told by Myra. She’s got a ringside seat right next door, and if there are any tricks happening in The Whole Enchilada, she never misses them. She says a pimp goes there to eat, also a drug pusher, both in broad daylight. She’s pointed them out to me, with much thrilled whispering. The pimp was wearing a three-piece suit, and looked like a stockbroker. The drug pusher had a grey moustache and a denim outfit, like an old-time union organizer.
    Myra’s shop is The Gingerbread House, Gifts and Collectibles. It’s got that sweet and spicy scent to it—some kind of cinnamon room spray—and it offers many things: jars of jam with cotton-print fabric tops, heart-shaped pillows stuffed with desiccated herbs that smell like hay, clumsily hinged boxes carved by “traditional craftsmen,” quilts purportedly sewn by Mennonites, toilet-cleaning brushes with the heads of smirking ducks. Myra’s idea of city folks’ idea of country life, the life of their pastoral hicktown ancestors—a little bit of history to take home with you. History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
    Myra likes to make presents to me from her stash of treasures. Otherwise put, she dumps items on me that folks won’t buy at the shop. I possess a lopsided twig wreath, an incomplete set of wooden napkin rings with pineapples on them, an obese candle scented with what appears to be kerosene. For my birthday she gave me a pair of oven gloves shaped like lobster claws. I’m sure it was kindly meant.
    Or perhaps she’s softening me up: she’s a Baptist, she’d like me to find Jesus, or vice versa, before it’s too late. That kind of thing doesn’t run in her family: her mother Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you’d call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn’t pay to get too mixed up with him. Certainly she didn’t want him in her kitchen, as she had enough on her hands as it was.
    After some deliberation, I bought a cookie at The Cookie Gremlin—oatmeal and chocolate chip—and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and sat on one of the park benches, sipping and licking my fingers, resting my feet, listening to the taped music with its lilting, mournful twang.
    It was my Grandfather Benjamin who built the button factory, in the early 1870s. There was a demand for buttons, as for clothing and everything connected with