Read Online The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford - Free Book Online

heavy thought in my head. I could feel it roosting, but when I tried to realize it, reach for it with my mind, it proved utterly elusive, like trying to catch a killifish in the shallows with your bare hands. On my way up to Hammond Lane, I saw Mr. and Mrs. Bishop being screamed at by their ten-year-old tyrant son, Reggie; passed by Boris, the janitor from East Lake, who was fixing his car out in his driveway; saw the lumbering, moon-eyed Horton kid, Peter, big and slow as a mountain, riding a bike whose seat seemed to have disappeared up his ass.
    We crossed Hammond Lane and went down the street lined on both sides with giant sycamores, leaves gone yellow and brown. To the left of me was the farm, cows grazing in the field; to the right was a plowed expanse of bare dirt where builders had begun to frame a line of new houses. Beyond that another mile, down a hill, amid a thicket of trees, next to the highway, we came to a stream.
    I sat with my back to an old telephone pole someone had dumped there and wrote up the neighbors I’d seen on my journey—told about how Mrs. Bishop had Reggie when she was forty-one; told about how the kids at school would try to fool Boris, who was Yugoslavian and didn’t speak English very well, and his invariable response: “Boys, you are talking dogshit”; told about the weird redneck Hortons, whom I had overheard described by Mrs. Conrad once as “incest from the hills.”
    When I was finished writing, I put my pencil in the notebook and pulled George close. I petted his head and told him, “It’s gonna be okay.” The thought I’d been carrying finally broke through, and I saw a figure, like a human shadow, leaning over Aunt Laura’s bed in the otherwise empty room at St. Anselm’s and lifting her up. He held her to him, enveloping her in his darkness and then, like a bubble of ink bursting, vanished.

Maybe He’ll Show Up for Lunch
    That night, well into her bottle of wine, my mother erupted, spewing anger and fear. During these episodes she was another person, a stranger, and when they were done. I could never remember what the particulars of her rage were, just that the experience seemed to suck the air out of the room and leave me unable to breathe. In my mind I saw the evil queen gazing into her talking mirror, and I tried to rebuff the image by conjuring the memory of a snowy day when I was little and she pulled Jim and me to school on the sled, running as fast as she could. We laughed, she laughed, and the world was covered in white.
    We kids abandoned our father, leaving him to take the brunt of the attack. Jim fled down the cellar to lose himself in Botch Town. Mary went instantly Mickey, encircled herself with a whispered string of numbers for protection, and snuck next door to Nan and Pop’s house. As I headed up the stairs to the refuge of my room, I heard the sound of a smack and something skittering across the kitchen floor. I knew it was either my father’s glasses or his teeth, but I wasn’t going downstairs to find out. I knew he was sitting there stoically, waiting for the storm to pass. I shoved off with Perno Shell down the Amazon in search of El Dorado.
    Some time later, just after Shell had taken a curare dart inthe neck and paralysis was setting in, there was a knock on my door. Mary came in. She curled up at the bottom of my bed and lay there staring at me.
    â€œHey,” I said, “want me to read you some people from my notebook?”
    She sat up and nodded.
    So I read her all the ones I had recently added, up to the Horton kid on his bike. I spoke my writing at a slow pace in order to kill time and allow her a long stint of the relief she found in the mental tabulation of my findings. When we finished, the house was silent.
    â€œAny winners in that bunch?” I asked.
    â€œBoris the janitor,” she said.
    â€œGo to bed now,” I told her.
    The next morning my mother was too hungover