Noah's Ark by Thomas King

Author:Thomas King [King, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443419604
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The sign stayed there until the night Papa came home singing, missed the driveway, and drove through the fence. He wasn’t hurt. He was still singing when Mum and William went out and helped him back to the house. But the sign exploded into a thousand splinters. When you make a new one, I told William, spell it right, C-A-N-A-A-N, three A’s. But he never did. He could see the bad times rising again.

“There are fourteen calves in the field, Mum,” said Luke when we got home. “I’ve named ten of them. You want to see them?”

Mum was sitting in the kitchen, smoking, her eyes all red from the cigarettes. “It’s okay, honey. Maybe tomorrow. “

The calves grew quickly, and, instead of huddling by their mothers, they began running around the field like idiots, playing with each other. Luke would sit on the fence and watch them. One of them, Mary, according to Luke, came all the way over to the fence to let Luke pet her. “I didn’t even have salt on my hand. Bet the bears wouldn’t do that.” On the weekends, when we crossed the field on our way to the zoo, the calves would bounce along behind us like rubber balls, all the way to the creek.

“I’m going to get a good job, soon,” Mum said. “I’ve got my name in at the big companies in town. This is just temporary. We’ll be back on our feet in no time.”

“How come you cry at night, Mum?”

“That’s a nightmare you’re having, Luke.”

“It’s the animals at the zoo he hears,” I said.

Mum got a job at the Woolworth’s store, but she didn’t stop smoking. When Star Wars came to town, we all went to see it. Granny, Mum, Luke, and me. Even Granny liked the movie. Mum bought a big bag of popcorn, and Luke and me each got a medium soft drink.

We didn’t hear the cows until we got home. Granny lit a cigarette and blew a silvery stream into the night sky. “They’ll go on like that for days,” she said. And she opened the porch and went in.

Luke and me stood in the yard and listened. It was the strangest sound, low and urgent, almost a wail, as though the cows were calling out to each other in the dark. Luke covered his ears.

“It’s the bull,” I said. “You’re too young to understand. ”

The cows kept up the racket for the next couple of nights. Granny said she could hear them all day long, that they never stopped. But, by Saturday, when we got up to go to the zoo, the cows were quiet.

The sun was low in the trees, when we got to the field. The grass was bright and wet, and the cows were moving through it, their heads dug in to the ground. They didn’t even look up when we climbed the fence. Luke was the first to notice.

“Where are the calves?”

The calves were gone. The field wasn’t very large. You could see along the fence line and all the way down to the creek.

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