Free The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue Page B

voice boomed over my head like the Orange drums on the Glorious Twelfth. "Who will lead this creature home so she will not fall in the ditch?"
    Up close he smelt like vinegar. I ripped my hand out of his grasp. "I can find my own way," I said, shoving past the other children, past the long chalky coat of Mr. McGranahan, who tried to hold me. I got out the door before I started crying.
    As a rule, I can follow any path through Stranorlar and not lose myself, but today I was so bewildered with rage that I very nearly stepped into the ditch opposite the smithy. Only the long grasses at the edge told me I was gone astray. When I got on the right track home I felt the last rays of sun on my face before the mountain snuffed them out.
    Once the Browns were great folk hereabouts. Our grandfathers father owned a big stretch of land, but he squandered it all. I can see it in my head if I try: a wet green kingdom, with rivers sliding through the fields like thread through cloth. Now all we have left that is grand is our grandmothers rocking chair. Sometimes our mother lets me sit in it if my feet are clean. Its back is carved with fruit and flowers and shapes that I can't make out no matter how often I trace them with my fingers.
    Our mother sits in that chair to do her darning. If I hold my breath now I can hear through the wall the faint creak of its rockers—unless that's more wishful thinking. Our father has been gone for hours. Mother was yawning at supper, but she'll not go in to bed before he comes home from Meeting.
    They didn't beat me, when I came home from school, not even when I told them every word I said to the Minister. Maybe they're saving it till tomorrow. I would rather have the beating over with and then I could sleep.
    Tabby's face is pressed against my hand on the pillow; I can feel her breath like an oven on my fingers. From the corner, Dickie lets out a faint snore. Martha turns over, without warning, and we all must shift too, myself and Tabby and Catherine and Billy at our feet, all packed together like mackerel in a pot.
    If the others were awake I would tell them a story: maybe the one about the cottage that stood in the middle of a village that stood in the middle of a bleak moor in the north country, where lived a certain man and his wife who had three cows, five sheep, and thirteen children. One more than us. Martha likes the tale of the old woman who wove her own hair. Ned prefers the one about the prince with fourteen names.
    If I had seven-league shoes and a cloak of invisibility I could be at the Meeting House now. Maybe they're too busy with other matters to discuss a froward child like me. Or else the Elders are arguing with my father this very moment, their big hands thumping the table. But even if I was invisible, it occurs to me, I couldn't make them listen; I couldn't change a thing.
    Once when I was small, our mother was teaching me to shell peas. They bounced out through my fingers, and when I reached for them I upset the whole basket. Then I cried, and my mother would have let me go and play on the grass, but my father made me crawl round and pick every pea up off the floor, and then wash the dust off them, for he said he knew I could do whatever I set my mind to. And he was right. But tonight when he was putting on his greatcoat to go to Meeting, he didn't seem so sure.
    I bury my face under the blanket and I make up pictures of things that cannot be. A town with seven windmills, and wolves with hair as long as sheep have, and a well in the woods that will make anything dipped in it grow. Sometimes in my imaginings I take a wrong turning, and scare myself. Then my thoughts feed on each other like worms in the black ground, but I must bite my thumb and lie still and not disturb the others, because we are so many in one room.
    I remember the last three being born. We all heard, through the wall, though we pretended not to. Our mother doesn't make half as much noise as most women, I heard the