Read Online The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien - Free Book Online Page A

it was decided to attack RIC enemy barracks in the old jail in Ennis. It was a well-known fact that the changing of the guard took place at six p.m. and that was the hour when the volunteers struck, others all along the street in case of mishap, the buying and selling of horses continuing as if all was normal, which of course it wasn’t. When the whistle blew they opened fire, English soldiers running it seems like red shanks, three captured and brought to Daly’s stables, relieved of their ammunition and taken away. There were twenty local men in the raid, which did not include our Michael, whom we believe is training others in the woods beyond Cratlow. Searches all
    over. Your father was searched on his way to the common land up the mountain. Finding a bottle of milk in his pocket, the British officer tried to make out that he was bringing it to his son or another bastard volunteer.
    “I’m bringing it to drink,” he told them. They did not let him go for over an hour. All this and you not here to help us.
    Your poor mother,
    Bridget

    Solveig

    solveig would put small knobs of dough on top of the bread, baby loaves, for our clandestine feasts in our bedroom at night.
    Come butter come
    Come butter come
    Little Johnny’s at the gate
    Waiting for his buttered cake.
    She learned that rhyme from me and would say it, though it clashed with the hymns. It was no longer her sleeping room, it was our sleeping room now. We made friends the night it thundered, big claps of it and forked lightning flared then sizzled inside the room, she cowering under my bed, terrified that Eric Eric, the man with the clapper who broke up the big ships in the harbor in Malmo, was coming for her.
    Ever after we were friends, we put paper curls in each other’s hair, and I helped her with her English compositions:
    Snow is frozen moisture that comes away from the clouds.
    Snow falls in feathery flakes.
    Boys make snowballs to pelt at one another.
    Snow crystals are a beautiful sight.
    The whole world falls asleep when snow settles.
    How we scoured the magazines and the newspapers that the missus threw out.
    A great-grandpa cut a tooth and a Mrs. White who lost a silver mesh bag with a pair of glasses and money was offering a substantial reward. A hostess, we learned, took poison at her own party and her husband was trying to hush it up. The Harts would be remaining at Huntingdon for the season but the Hammonds had gone to Connecticut and a Mrs. Harding had offered her beautiful home in Southampton to the president and was awaiting a favorable reply. A flighty Mrs. Stillman had formed an intimacy with her Indian servant while her financier husband was in a romance with a revue girl, and Mrs. Stillman’s substantial alimony was only because of a baby just born, but, as the judge said, she would carry a stain that could never be erased. Houdini, who lived only a few streets away from us and who could do amazing stunts, such as escape from a barred prison cell, or a first-class straitjacket, met his Waterloo on a crowded streetcar at rush hour, realizing he was going in the wrong direction. Houdini tried to get out, had to wriggle, squirm, twist, and elbow his way and when by dint of sheer muscle he did escape, he fainted on the platform with nerves.
    We had yet to get on a streetcar.
    Up there in our attic room, dreaming of crush-proof blouses and coatees and capes and stoles and muffs, we were happy, because we had each other.
    “For your Mademoiselle a symphony in toiletries,” Solveig would read, puzzling over the words. Two pools of limpid beauty could be ours, hers and mine, by just cutting a coupon and sending off for Dr. Isaac Thompson’s eye water that silvered the eyes to a diamond glitter and brought snowy whiteness to the cornea. Everything was just a matter of cutting a coupon and enclosing ten cents before stocks ran out, oriental creams in white, flesh, and rachel, the colors decreed by Paris, Princess-pat powders from Biarritz