Read Online The Last Season by Roy Macgregor - Free Book Online

his blanket. The Sikorskis went into Batcha’s room with the sack, and a bit later the old bitch herself came out to the kitchen and gathered up a large bowl, the butcher knife and some towels.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I whispered to Poppa, but he only shook his head and refused to answer.
    I went up to my room, wishing I was back in Vernon and able to lose myself in some National Geographic . I thought I could nap, but the house seemed filled with murmured prayers and Mrs. Sikorski’s crying so I got up, came down, bundled up and went out to split some of the hardwood Poppa had stacked back of the shed.
    After a while I forgot about what was going on in the house. And might have forgotten completely had I not gone to get one of Poppa’s splitting wedges. Where we threw the ashes back of the shed someone had kicked a hole in the snow and then covered the work over again. But the frayed edges of the top of Sikorski’s burlap sack were sticking free hardened with the cold, black with frozen blood.
    I began to kick at it, imagining that inside might be Mrs. Sikorski’s cancer. Had Batcha gone completely insane and begun to think of herself as a surgeon? But when I moved the sack around with my foot and forced the opening with the axe tip, I saw that whatever was inside had fur. It couldn’t possibly be anything to do with the sick woman. Picking up the sack by the bottom, I shook hard. The blood cracked around the opening, split, and reluctantly the sack released its contents.
    It was a cat. A black cat, with white paws. And there was a great black and matted slice in the chest where the heart had been.
    Batcha was obviously sicker than even I had imagined. I threw the sack over the corpse and kicked snow back on top. The ground was too hard to bury it; the stink would be too much to burn it; I left it, knowing the foxes would soon enough find it and dispose of the thing properly. But whether to laugh or feel sad? What was worse, the Sikorskis’ gullibility or their desperation? Or the fact that the bitch was profiting on others’ fear?
    I found the wedge and returned to the woodpile, quitting only when blisters broke on each hand. But by then the bitch and her lunacy had been worth a cord and a half of rock-hard maple.
    I had a feeling this might be my last Christmas holiday at home. It was not just my disgust with Batcha and her ways. No matter what I did, nothing seemed to have the old feel to it. Ig and I set snares up along the cedar lines and caught six fat rabbits, but we would have had a dozen or more if Puck hadn’t peed over every wire we set. We went ice fishing on Black Donald but caught only pike, no pickerel. And Father Schula made sure Danny and I came out to a bantam practice, obviously to show us off, and even that felt funny. The ice was all cobbly and some of the boards had given away in the corners. And while we had our own skates with us, Danny had to wear his brother Terry’s equipment and I got stuck with Father Schula’s.
    I had no reason to feel astounded that a priest would have a jock, yet I was: I was conscious of the feel of it all the time, a kind of unholy sensation like getting an erection during mass, and it made me skate bowlegged as if I was protecting my privates with the chalice.
    Father Schula also arranged for Danny and I to serve the midnight mass after the Christmas eve Oplatck . Poppa and Ig’s maiden sister Jozefa had come from Pembroke, and their brother Jan arrived with his new girlfriend Sophia, a horse-faced woman from Renfrew with perfumed Kleenex stuffed up each sleeve and down the bubbling front of her fancy dress. Good old Uncle Jan had another new car, a big green Chevrolet Impala with rear fenders like blue heron wings and a trunk full of four cases of India Pale Ale. We spent Oplatck gathered around the kitchen table, Batcha leading Ig in prayers, Poppa leading Jan in beers, and all of us trying to swallow this thin,