West by Carys Davies

Author:Carys Davies [Davies, Carys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After this she is more wary of Elmer Jackson, who some weeks ago traced a circle with his thumb on her hand while her aunt Julie’s back was turned. After today, and the librarian, she feels certain that before long Elmer Jackson is also going to try to put his hand on her bottom.

She becomes fearful, skittish. The world is harder to enjoy; she feels anxious and afraid. She wishes her father would come home and that her mother had not died. “You have Aunt Julie,” she tries to tell herself, but Aunt Julie does not seem like someone who will protect her. Aunt Julie is always inviting Elmer Jackson into the house and making him dinner and cups of coffee, or off having meetings with the minister or taking plates of food to sick people or paying calls on Sidney Lott’s mother, Helen. “I am twelve years old,” says Bess aloud to herself. “I am too young to be without any kind of protector.”

She begins to let herself dream that her father is on his way home, that he will be here very soon.

She begins to let herself dream that he is no longer very far away.

She begins to let herself dream that while he’s been gone he has managed to find not only the big monsters he was looking for but also her mother.

Like the man with the golden harp, he will bring her with him, except he will be cleverer than the man with the golden harp and not look back, he will keep going all the way until they are both home. She will look out from the porch and they will be coming towards her along the stony path in front of the house and they will stay and they will look after her and keep her safe from the man with the eyeglasses and Elmer Jackson.

Bess has no memory at all of her mother.

Her thimble and her knitting needles used to sit in a drawer in the square pine table. Small wooden knobs decorated the blunt ends of the needles, which were long and slender and cold. Bess has a pair of stockings made with them, and she can see how the neat stitches were produced by them, the empty spaces created by the needles. The stockings are no longer big enough for her feet, but she wears them sometimes on her hands around the house in winter when it’s very cold in the mornings and the stove hasn’t got properly started.

Mostly, though, she knows her dead mother from her striped blouse, which used to hang on the back of the door in her father’s bedroom, behind his own Sunday shirt and the black pants he wore into Lewistown. For as long as she can remember, she has been curious about her, and more and more there are times when she hopes what the minister and her aunt Julie say is true: that she lives now in another realm. A realm with a narrow gate and many mansions, with springs of living water and no scorching heat and no more night.

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