Read Online The Other by David Guterson - Free Book Online Page A

Arthur Brown, known almost exclusively for its song “Fire,” which was on the charts for a while, so that you heard it often on the radio, and it was this that John William quoted at that moment—“I am the god of hell fire and I bring you: fire!”—which made us both laugh. We fed the flames, throwing our shadows against the cliff wall—where their skewed shapes formed a backdrop for lofting sparks—and celebrated not only fire but ourselves. John William said, “We can’t tell anyone about this place. I mean it. We have to have a blood pact. We have to cut our palms and shake hands.”
    I said, “That’s some corny bullshit.”
    John William dug his knife from his pocket. “Neil,” he said, “don’t wimp out.”
    It hurt. But the hard part was doing it, not the pain. As you might expect, every time you move the blade toward your hand your brain stops you. John William got it done after one false start, but I pulled back three times while he bled. “Pretend it’s not your hand,” he advised.
    I finally opened my palm down the center. I’d cut myself before, but only accidentally. This was different; I didn’t feel damaged.
    John William and I opted for the soul shake. It didn’t start with white guys, but white guys can understand at least part of it, and since it seemed right for this occasion, a deeply solid contact, thumbs clamped, arms crooked, the weight of each brother in a fleeting, felt balance, we mingled our blood that way.
     

     
    M Y MOTHER DIED when she was thirty-nine, a month before I turned thirteen. She had a Grade 4 astrocytoma—an aggressive brain tumor—that didn’t take long to blind and kill her. What I remember best is that her singing voice still moved me right up until a few weeks before the end. I remember her singing “The Maid of Llanwellyn” in a lilting a cappella, even after she’d gone cross-eyed. Of course, she knew that my sister and I, and my father if he was home, could hear her singing from elsewhere in the house, and she also knew, I’m sure, that it got to us. I used to stop what I was doing when she sang. I guess I poised myself to ponder more clearly, with the evidence for it plainly in my ears, the trajectory of her last days. A few times, I sat in a closet and plugged my ears, because listening made me angry. Even at twelve, I understood that my mother sang in an emotional register no listener could easily ignore. One day, seeing her at the piano with only a little hair on her head, I realized I hadn’t heard her sing for a while, and after that she didn’t sing anymore, and then she didn’t play the piano, either. I’m not sure, but I think she chose not to sing, late in the game, because she didn’t care for what she heard.
    It was July, and we skipped the Cavanaugh reunion. My father went on working, but he lost weight. He owned a battery-operated shortwave radio, and I walked the streets carrying that on my shoulder, the way kids carried boomboxes in the eighties. It was ’69, so there was good music on FM. One place I liked to go was a half-lot with a transformer station behind a chain-link fence, where I’d loll in the shade with the radio beside me. I also walked railroad tracks, breaking every bottle I could find.
    People, it’s said, die in character. After she was told about the astrocytoma, my mother, for a while, tried to learn Gaelic and got interested in the Book of Kells. She bought a book of Irish tales, which I inherited by default—“Oisin in Tir Na nOg,” by P. W. Joyce; “The Legend of Knockgrafton,” by T. Crofton Croker; and so on. Wraiths, corpses, coffins, graveyards, solitary ruins, sorrow on the wind, and landscapes of gray loneliness. Characters are hounded toward death, or wither, or freeze, or slide into the sea, and in the end the storyteller will say something like “The blessing of God on the souls of the dead!” or “Thus did the hermit lay the four children of Lir to rest at last.”
    At the funeral,