Read Online The Seary Line by Nicole Lundrigan - Free Book Online Page A

while she was the painful punishment.
    â€œCan’t blame them for a wanting a bit of fresh air now, can you? Heh-heh.”
    â€œWouldn’t dream of it,” she had murmured, hot iron pressing on her words.
    Delia lay down on the daybed again, threw the blanket across her knees. Percy would be upset if he returned, found her traipsing about their house. Tomorrow was Sunday, everyone would be at church, and she needed to appear rested. Other than Dr. Barnes, no one really knew about her peculiar illness. Percy never told a soul, and neither did she – not that she really had a soul willing to listen. But silently, both of them had agreed. Sharing the story of her sickness, speaking of it in the open, would only change it into something real.

    Last night’s storm had torn away the mounds of seaweed that clung to the rocks, then thrashed them about, tossed them up on the beach. Percy and the children were down there now, crawling over the stones, collecting the slippery strings and shoving them into four enamel buckets. When the buckets were filled, Percy would cart them up over the road, onto his property, and dump the mess in small piles on his garden. After strewing it around, he would leave it, allowit to rot over the winter, creating a rich fertilizer for his potato plants in the spring.
    As he tipped the fourth bucket from a load, Percy leaned his head in close to the pile, edges of the kelp already withered and blackened with the high October sun. He inhaled deeply, considered how it was an honest odour, the scent of hard work. His mother was jumbled up in that smell – along with his four brothers, a handful of squashed damsons – all part of the last pleasant family memory he held.
    Every Sunday afternoon, when he and his brothers were boys, they were instructed to sit on the hard bench in the front room. The embroidered cushion was always laid aside, as their mother predictably announced, “Now’s not the time to be thinking about comfort.” The older three were told to read from a thick book of yellowed pages. Children’s Bible stories. Percy, who was not yet big enough to read, was told instead to simply sit still and concentrate on something “holy.”
    Percy struggled with this, the concentrating bit. He tried, no doubt, but when he stirred his mind, a dirty stew of thoughts floated up, spoiled root vegetables bumping against the spoon. A dead chicken’s head on a bloody stump. Blisters on his tongue after a fever. The queer excitement of watching his mother undress, the sheerness of her cotton slip. Nothing “holy” there. While he waited for something to arrive, he chewed and swallowed his fingernails, sucked the blood that often wept from torn skin.
    â€œBy the looks on your face, little Percy, your thoughts is a far cry from holy,” John, the oldest, sniped. “Well, fellers,” he continued, “if you asks me, I’ll tell you something that idn’t holy. Plunking our arses on this bench, when ’tis a fine day calling us. Surely God don’t intend that.”
    Though Percy shivered at the thought of disobeying, he rose as the others rose, made his way out the front door with them and into what their father affectionately referred to as, “Mother’s Newfangled Garden.” A mess of sturdy sheep laurel, cornflowers, wild asters, and phlox. Other flowers now dead, tangles of sleepy plants beginning to wither.
    They stole past a group of men in painted chairs, bellies like balls rising and falling as they dozed in the afternoon sun. “Holy dreams, I’s betting,” John whispered.
    Down the path and across the log that made a greasy bridge over the brook, the brothers reached the backend of Widow Samson’s yard. Her house was plunked in the very middle, blue clapboard, faded and crackled like a smashed robin’s eggshell. Jumping her rickety fence, they crept through the dry grass until they reached