Read Online The Knife Sharpener's Bell by Rhea Tregebov - Free Book Online Page A

manina.
Puccini, Verdi, Wagner. All the fancy big shots with their velvet evening cloaks and long white gloves. With my wages I bought those gold opera glasses trimmed in mother-of-pearl. If you’re a good girl I’ll let you play with them. Mother-of-pearl. Nobody was going to look down on me. Leave your hair alone already; it’s done. Go. Go now and play.
    It’s spring. I’m tired of waiting for Poppa. I want what I want and I want Poppa, but I can’t have him. There’s nothing to do. I want to dig, but there’s nothing to dig. I’m itchy fromwaiting. I’ve asked Cassie but the ground in her garden is still too wet from the thaw to work in, and below the wet part it’s still too hard. So I’m out on the back porch, poking in the dirt of the flower box with an old bent fork, when I hear it, the
dah-dong
, full-bellied, swaying. The opening note light, and then the second note a gap in the heart, a falling. No way out. Ben’s hunched over his arithmetic, but at the sound he looks up, looks at me. “Annette, cut it out. Don’t start that stuff up again.”
    I can see the familiar look of irritation come over his face – see but don’t see it because I’m so big with fear.
    â€œStop it,” he says. “You’re almost nine. You can’t be scared of a stupid noise.” But I can’t do anything but feel this sound come into me: something bad.
    â€œI’ll show you, Annette. I’ll show you there’s nothing to be scared of.” He sets his hands on my shoulders. “You can’t be scared like this, understand?” Takes my hand. “C’mon. You come with me.”
    He’s pulling me along the sidewalk by the hand. I can’t see anything except my hand in his, breath a bubble in the mouth that keeps me from saying anything. The sound is coming closer, or we’re coming closer to the sound, and I feel it pulling my chest tight.
    â€œAnnette, look up, will you? Just look up? See? See?” The sound has stopped. “Annette.”
    Ben’s got me by the hand I can’t get away can’t do anything but what he tells me to do. I can’t remember what I want. He’s standing in front of me, looking into me so that I have to look at him, feel myself pulled out of my fear.
    â€œLook up. Stop listening and look.” He steps aside.
    The sound stops inside me. I see an old man in a worn grey suit jacket, a navy turtleneck sweater under the jacket,the wheel for sharpening beside him, unmoving, the tarnished brass bell in his hand, silent, its grey wooden handle. Blue eyes looking at me without any malice, without any interest. He has no question for me, expects nothing from me, has nothing to say. Wants nothing. He turns away, walks on down the sidewalk and the sound begins. Outside me.
    Ben takes my hand again. I’m shaking. “Let’s go home,” he says.
    I can feel the sound outside me, far away, having nothing to do with me. Just an old man who wanted nothing. I looked him in the face.
    How many times did Ben try to rescue me from myself? One day he took me down Main Street to Pollock’s Hardware, past the little Ukrainian church, the one set back a bit from Main Street that’s decorated with squat little swirly shaped towers – upside-down tops or right-side-up soft ice cream cones, onion domes. He’d worked all week clearing out the basement of Zalinsky’s store and the dollar folded in his pocket was to buy me a birthday present, two days late. Pollock’s smelled of sawdust and machine oil. It had shelves and shelves of cardboard boxes of nails and screws and loops and claws of black or grey metal that men in overalls pawed with grease-blackened hands. Girls didn’t belong there, but Ben put something cool and oblong in my hand: a penknife, my very own penknife. Folded closed, it fit just right in my hand. All the way home I held it, ran my