Random Passage by Bernice Morgan & Michael Crummey

Author:Bernice Morgan & Michael Crummey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Breakwater Books Ltd.
Published: 2015-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

I didn’t see Ida Norris that day, years ago when Frank brought her to Cape Random but I remember Mamma telling us how she looked – beautiful as a china doll and saying her words the way proper people do. It’s hard now to think of Ida like that. The truth is, until lately we hardly thought about her at all. It was almost as if she had died same as poor Hazel.

For years Meg, Sarah, and Annie have taken turns going to the Norris house to change the filthy quilts, wash the mad woman and dress her in clean clothing. Between times Frank and Rose do for her. Annie Vincent, who goes most often to the Norris house, has never been heard to mention Frank Norris’s wife. But according to Sarah and Meg, Ida is now completely silent. Her only occupation is stripping wallpaper from all the upstairs rooms. Hour after hour, Ida picks at the flowered patterns with her dirty fingernails, carefully peeling the paper back in long ribbons, leaving it to flutter so that the dusty, unused rooms look as if they are ravelling away.

It must be a strange life for Frank and Rose, Lavinia thinks, like living with a ghost. For the rest of Cape Random, the demented woman is only a grey face glimpsed occasionally in one of the upstairs windows of the Norris house, a name children whisper to frighten each other on summer evenings when they have stayed too long outdoors.

Then one morning Frank Norris pulls on his boots and finds that during the night they have been filled with molasses. The next day he and Rose come in at suppertime to discover two goats barred in the kitchen. The following day Frank’s tobacco, his only luxury, is mixed into the flour barrel. The tricks continue; each day Rose whispers a new story of her mother’s malevolence into Willie’s ear. In time, everyone knows that Ida’s sickness has taken a strange turn. It is unsettling, virulent, as if someone long dead had risen and was demanding attention.

Sarah Vincent understands at once that Ida’s pranks have something to do with her daughter and Frank. She has known for a long time that the two are lovers, has wept over it secretly, lectured Annie by day and prayed for her by night without speaking of it even to Meg. Taking Ida’s acts as a warning from God that Frank and Annie’s adultery must stop, Sarah renews her efforts, to persuade Annie of this.

“God is not mocked…be sure your sins will find you out,” she tells her daughter morning and night, with no results.

One evening after supper, desperation drives Sarah to tell Josh her fears. “I don’t doubt Ida Norris knows her husband and our Annie been actin’ like married people.” Although they are alone, Sarah turns deep red and glances around the room.

Josh looks down at his hands, studying each finger, rubbing his thick knuckles, not speaking.

“I tell you, Josh, I’m tarmented out of me mind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.