Read Online Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt - Free Book Online

grandfather’s house, I was given the room with the western view that lit up the matchstick winter trees, a book’s worth at a strike—wasteful, too early, short. Winter afternoons, pitched in dark, we sometimes slept in the library, lap-robed in Sunday’s papers, my grandfather snoring clogged snores from stories. Warty giants who lived in caves beyond the umbered forest—my grandfather was like one of those in his sleep, or that was how I saw him if I was first to wake. I saw the large sore nose, its old-age red, and the rest of him brown-speckled like an egg, and yet I kissed him.
    “Too much,” my grandfather said. “That’s enough.”
    There was more he was saying, except I movedaway with my part of the paper, which was never Grandfather’s part of the paper. His part of the paper was nothing to read.
    My father said he could not read. He said, “Now they’ve got me on this stuff, I can’t concentrate. I can’t see. All I do is sleep and sleep.”
    I had never seen my father asleep, never known him to be other than fever-pitch awake; flame-tip skin and heat I had felt from his fingers at my cheeks. Not afraid of touching, my father was not, and his roiled speech—sometimes hard to follow what he said. “These drugs,” he said. “It’s not my fault”—any more than he was here in this last new place. “My own father,” my father said. “He did this to me.”
    “Did what?” I asked. Left alone sometimes in his room to talk, we talked about my grandfather: hard as the stony place that he had made into a home—and me in it. What was he doing with me on the estate? was the question.
    My father lifted at the skirt of his short robe. He asked, “What does he want from you?”
    I scratched him.
    “You would think we were lovers,” he said, and I hit at his arms, pushed at his chest with the heels of my hands, pushed at the softening parts—at his belly. He laughed and then grew angry and slapped small slaps fast, all over me, until I was backed up against the door and crying; surely, a snotty, messy kind of crying, the body in an ooze, although what I remember is the joy I felt to call my father fucker—“You fucker.”
    I told my grandfather, “I wish I were yours.” Almost any Sunday I said it. Even if the second wifewere present, as she sometimes was, I said, “I never want to live with my father again.” The second wife thought it best, too. In my grandfather’s house, there was routine: cook’s soft-boiled egg in the morning and a table-set dinner each night. Not as it had been with Daddy, the second wife was sure of this, how it was with my father—she had known me eating at the sink from a bag, school shoes still missing and late for school—yet she had let my father drive me.
    “Good-bye. See you later. See you next Sunday, next month, next year. You wouldn’t want me to give up work. None of this, of course, means I don’t love you. Remember how it was. You understand. This is better.” Any one of us could have said as much.
    Besides, I wanted every morning to break up buttered toast into the eggcup.
    I wanted lots and lots of new clothes.
    Keys to the car, plane ticket, passport, backstage passes.
    I wanted to be between visits on a Saturday when we walked Grandfather’s gardens—him with the pruners in his pocket and a cane he used to beat at things while he pruned in rolled-up sleeves. The steeped-tea color of my grandfather’s arms, sure in every gesture, aroused me. I wanted to brush against and lick him: the pouch at his neck, his white, white hair. Stooped, skinny, abrupt in motion, loose clothes slipping off, my grandfather used his pruners. He worked beneath a weak sun and did not sweat or smell of anything more than his ordered soap, green bars with age cracks that looked like saved stones from the bottom of the lake. The lake, from whichever angle we looked, waschipped blues or grays, or buckled, as with ice; and when it was ice, we stayed indoors. We watched for