Read Online Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas - Free Book Online

as though a long night lying next to my father affords her no rest or joy. She walks out to the outhouse with a jacket over her flannel nightgown and her long hair hanging down her back in the bent waves her braids have imposed upon it. She’s the opposite of Samson: her long hair saps her strength. Her stomach is still saggy from where her babies were, all those years before. She’s haggard with her worries — her worries are like the puppies rooting into poor Chummy when she lay by the bunkhouse with her brown fur mangy and her tits stretched out, sharp-teethed little puppies sucking their mother to death. It’s not us feeding on my mother, me and Phillip: it’s her own unhappiness.
    A sense of possibility is growing in me, a cold, crackling energy — I feel it in the long muscles of my thighs when I dig my skate blades into the ice. Little hard lumps have begun collecting under my nipples. When I first feel them I’m stung. I never asked for this, it’s not prompted by any secret aspiration I have to be a woman. But I’ve announced myself. The day I went to the show with Jimmy Thrasher I threw down some sort of gauntlet. I examine my mother’s reply, the story of the girl who drank lye. I’ve got a farm child’s grasp of reproduction, but certain elements of that story elude me. The practical matter of how they managed it in a theatre seat, for one. And the character of the girl herself, who seemed furtively, recklessly bad, and yet was prepared to kill herself in a hideous manner to spare her family — although surely her drinking lye would only deepen the disgrace?
    I’m helpless in all this, carried forward like a piece of bark on the creek in the spring. I sense that my mother’s being carried along too, playing a part she might not have chosen to play. Satan finds work for idle hands, she said, and then seemed immediately sorry, as though he’s too close, he’s a family member we’ve decided never to mention. Jimmy Thrasher’s busy, dirty hands come to me, boldly slicing open the raccoon, sliding its skinned body into a sack. And then in the movie, his hands grabbing at me, trying to worm their way onto the bodice of my dress, sliding up my leg. Quit doing that, I had to say all through the show, until finally I sank my nails deep into the flesh of his forearm and he called me a word I had never heard before and went to sit somewhere else.
    It was sordid, I can see that. I sit in the church listening to what Mr. Dalrymple has to say about sin. In a real church, not the loft. The Nebo Gospel Chapel, a new church the men built a summer or two ago, when a letter from Mr. Pangbourne arrived, Mr. Pangbourne who had come into his money in the old country. I’m too old for Sunday school.
She’s
too old,I think, considering myself sitting in a pew with other girls my age, noting my thoughtful expression. She sits in a navy wool skirt, her legs gracefully crossed above her clumsy galoshes.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,
reads out the minister. The girl savours the words:
desperately wicked.
She thinks of Bette Davis, when her parents came to the door (sober, respectable people with foreign accents like the Galicians’) and Bette’s father saw the giant shadow of Gene Raymond in his daughter’s bedroom putting his clothes on.
I don’t believe what you believe,
said Bette Davis. She spoke so strangely, as though the concept of speech was foreign to her, as though she’d rather just cast her eyes up and down under their heavy, shiny lids. It is her desperation, possibly, slowing her movements, weighing down her eyelids.
    In the new, whitewashed church the signs of the Lord’s coming are not so obvious. Maybe the girl will be here to grow up after all. She’s more than she was (they were right to forbid movies), but she has no conception of what she can be. She’s sent to her room to