Read Half-Sick of Shadows for Free Online Page A

never comfort. Father used a bamboo cane for the correction of his sinful children. When the cane was in another room, off came his belt, which he called the strap. How he relished clenching those yellow teeth and wielding the strap. We were to thank the Lord – and we did, because we knew no other way, even as we whimpered with lash burns on the backs of our legs and buttocks – that He had given us a father well able to keep us pious.
    Sophia and I, holding hands, grew goose bumps. They were the same goose bumps we regrew daily. The ghost hand locked in mine had fleshless bone for fingers. Her wrist might snap at a sudden twist. She had arms like twigs, and bath-time shoulders like those on a victim from a ghastly prisoner of war camp like the ones I’d seen in the encyclopedia.
    She had a lovely face.
    … bloodless though it was, big-eyed, somewhat nervous, a little frightened perhaps, like a vulnerable forest creature wary of sudden noises. And there were plenty of those in the Manse.
    Father looked like Isaiah, or Ezekiel, without a beard. He waved his palms Heavenward and shouted at the sky.
    ‘Oh, loving heavenly Father who hast created us from dust and made us whole, who hast died for our sins and saved us, comfort us this day in thy manifest mercy. Be thou our strength.’
    … and on, and on, until his voice was the same as the wind.
    The chill should have kept me awake. Instead, I slipped into a doze on my feet as Father read Psalms from the big black King James bible with its thys, thees and thous, green pastures, paths of righteousness, valley of the shadow of death where I need fear no evil for the Lord my God is with me, and so on and so forth and on and on some more. The bible’s pages were thumbed off-white at the edges. Its cover was floppy with excessive bending. Father had written an extra testament or two in the margins with his fountain pen.
    Father called it the Family Bible. But it was his. He smacked my legs with the strap once for setting it on a shelf face down.
    ‘Never put the bible face down! That’s Satanism. Never ever put it face down. I won’t say it again.’ His bible occupied the kitchen table, the hearth, his chair in the living room when he got up to stretch his legs and potter a while as fathers do. The bible seemed to follow Father around, always one step behind him – or one step ahead. He would approach his chair, lift the bible off the cushion and sit down to read with it open at the correct page, all in such a fluid motion, without pauses of any length, you would think the bible an extra and perfectly functioning body part.
    The cessation of Father’s voice, and the scrape of casket on planks, roused me and gripped my attention. I returned from the place in my head where I had been, and noticed that Sophia had slipped her hand out of mine. She had left my side. Where had she gone?
    A moment of panic! Me, looking around!
    Mother gave me a reproachful look. I stiffened and stopped looking around. Her disapproval shamed me. When mother scolded us, we deserved it. ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead,’ she said – often – if a snigger slipped out, or an unkind utterance concerning a deceased grandparent (never within Father’s earshot, of course).
    I watched Father and Gregory about the business of burial out of respect for Mother’s wishes rather than respect for my dead grandmother. How could I respect her? I knew nothing about the old woman other than that she once produced Father. Granny Hazel used to sit by the fire with a face like curdled milk. Awake or asleep, the only difference was whether her eyeballs were on show. Worst of all, she always smelled of hours-old pee that saturated the bed sheets, soaked into the mattress, and penetrated the cushion on her fireside chair.
    Gregory took his position on one side of the casket. Father took his on the other and said a silent prayer. Gregory had the longer side of the ropes that ran under what remained of Granny Hazel,