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

change her dress after church and she lies back on the bed and reaches up to feel the lumps on her chest (softer and bigger every week). She thinks about Charlotte’s funny, wry face, and Mrs. Parrot laughing as her things were sold. She toys with the possibility that she can be something wholly unconnected to her mother.

    Other places exist, my father is proof of it. He’s a changeling, you might think: he has a changeling’s ways. He’s fitting a pane of glass into a window in the barn, and I go to help him, to hold everything steady while he presses a narrow bank of putty into the frame. He’s so close through the glass that I can see the dots of his whiskers, the fine lines of white at the corners of his eyes that the sun never reaches because he’s always squinting. He doesn’t speak.
    It was my dad who sent me to my room after I went to the show with Jimmy Thrasher. After Mother and I got back from picking peas at the Feazels’ I was out in the yard when he drove in. He got out of the Ford and stood for a minute looking at me over the hood. After all that had happened, he was
himself,
with his faded overalls and his mild eyes, and the points of his shirt collar frayed and curling. But when he took the little wagon out of the truck and came over to talk to me, I was stunned to see that he was angry. He asked me if it was true I’d gone to the show the day before. Mr. Gorrie, he said. Mr. Gorrie was on the street when you come out. He seen you. With the blacksmith’s lad. Hurt flared up in me — at the unfairness of it, that I should be held accountable to ordinary rules on such a night.
    Your mother’s going to be upset, he said.
    Why do you have to tell her? I cried. My chest quaked and a sob, a single, hard sob, burst out. We stood together beside the house, where drought and constant traffic had pounded the grass to nothing. I was choked by pain. I’d have been glad if he’d gone into the kitchen to get the fly swatter and given me a licking, I’d have been glad for the sting and the familiar voluptuous crying, the machinery of crying taking me over entirely. But he just stood there. He took his cap off and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and then he dropped his eyes to me. For an instant I saw into him, I saw his love and his bewilderment. You better go to your room, chuck, he said, and I went.

    In 1902, Salford, Lancashire, my father’s home, was a warren of narrow cobbled streets — just as it is today. They say Friedrich Engels navigated those streets every month in a buggy on his way to oversee his mill in Manchester. George claimed, in fact, that Engels wrote,
The proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains
with a bit of charcoal while being driven down Eccles Old Road. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a toll man on the turnpike. He had worked in the mill until the mill took off his left hand and then sacked him as unfit for the job. He knew nothing about farming.
    I wanted especially to imagine my dad leaving home, taking hold of his fate and getting on a ship. My mother scorned imagination, I went where she couldn’t go. It was hard — all I had for material was what Joe Pye said and the gleaming stone streets of a Bette Davis movie. Once I went to England, once I sailed into the port at Liverpool and met my nana with her big rag-doll face, I had something more to go by. But in a way it was even harder then to understand. Those mild-mannered, incurious people, exactly how did they do it? Did they dream of Canada the way I dreamt of England?
    This is what I finally figured: that, as with most things, there was no real moment when my grandparents decided to send their son away forever. They started talking about it, and then excitement took over, and they couldn’t bear to go back to ordinary days. Ten pounds spent on curtains and pots would have raised their stock in the street, but not the way it