Read Online In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff - Free Book Online Page A

Tab’s got himself an extra key nobody knows about to his daddy’s liquor closet. We aim to do some very big drinking. And I mean very big.”
    I went to the door. “If I don’t see you in the morning, have a Merry Christmas.”
    â€œYou bet, buddy. Same to you.” Eugene grabbed my right hand in both of his. His fingers were soft and damp. “Take it easy on those Baltimore girls. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
    Jaime had been called home the week before by his mother’s death. His bed was stripped, the mattress doubled over. All the pictures in the room had gone with him, and the yellow walls glared blankly. I turned out the lights and sat on my bed until the bell rang for dinner.
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    I had never met my aunt or uncle before. They picked me up at the station in Baltimore with their four children, three girls and a boy. I disliked all of them immediately. During the drive home my aunt asked me if my poor father had ever learned to cope with my mother’s moods. One of the girls, Pammy, fell asleep on my lap and drooled on me.
    They lived in Sherwood Park, a brick suburb several miles outside the city. My aunt and uncle went out almost every night and left me in charge of the children. This meant turning the television set on and turning it off when they had all passed out in front of it. Putting them to bed any earlier wasn’t in the cards. They held on to everything—carpets, electrical cords, the legs of tables and chairs—and when that failed tried to injure themselves by scratching and gouging at their own faces.
    One night I broke down. I cried for almost an hour and tried to call Talbot to ask him if I could come up to Boston and stay with him. The Nevins’s number was unlisted, however, and after I washed my face and considered the idea again, I thought better of it.
    When I returned to school my aunt and uncle wrote my father a letter which he sent on to me. They said that I was selfish and unenterprising. They had welcomed me as a son. They had opened their hearts to me, but I had taken no interest in them or in their children, my cousins, who worshipped the very ground I walked on. They cited an incident when I was in the kitchen reading and the wind blew all my aunt’s laundry off the line and I hadn’t so much as asked if I could help. I just sat there and went right on reading and eating peanuts. Finally, my uncle was missing a set of cuff links that had great sentimental value for him. All things considered, they didn’t think my coming to Baltimore had worked out very well. They thought that on future vacations I would be happier somewhere else.
    I wrote back to my father, denying all charges and making a few of my own.
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    After Christmas Talbot and I were often together. Both of us had gone out for basketball, and as neither of us was any good to the team—Talbot because of an ankle injury, me because I couldn’t make the ball go through the basket—we sat together on the bench most of the time. He told me Eugene had spoiled his stepmother’s Christmas by leaning back in an antique chair andbreaking it. Thereafter I thought of Mrs. Nevin as a friend; but I had barely a month to enjoy the alliance because in late January Talbot told me that his father and stepmother had separated.
    Eugene was taken up with swimming, and I saw him rarely. Talbot and I had most of our friends among the malcontents in the school: those, like Talbot, to whom every rule gave offense; those who missed their girl friends or their cars; and those, like me, who knew that something was wrong but didn’t know what it was.
    Because I was not rich my dissatisfaction could not assume a really combative form. I paddled around on the surface, dabbling in revolt by way of the stories I wrote for off the record , the school literary journal. My stories took place at “The Hoatch School” and concerned a student from the West whom