Free The All of It: A Novel by Jeannette Haien

conscious of himself than of her.
    She gave him a smile of the purest appreciation, then took up with: “As you’d suppose he would, Kevin had us to start off the next day at first light…. It was an overcast kind of a morning, very cool, the wind being up and the sky filled with those thin uncertain clouds that has tails to them—”
    “‘Kite-clouds,’ we called them when I was a boy.”
    “Aye,” she nodded. “Beautiful they are too, sailing so fast over your head, one after the other, racing.”
    He remembered lying in the grass, faced heavenward, playing at the solitary game of picking out the speediest….
    “That day, it was like we were tied to them, Father,” she mused quietly on, “like they were pulling us along, there was such a hurry in us and no hint of tiring…. Usually when we were on the move, we’d speak between us of what we noticed on the way, flowers and trees, different birds and creatures and the like.” She stopped; then, in a rushing way: “Did you know, Father, that Kevin fancied kestrels? Indeed…. Since he was very small…. He was forever looking up, searching them out in the sky. What always took him, he said, was the way they sit , so high up, you know, with an entire view of the world before them yet with nothing in the world to ransom or fetter them…. The morning I’m speaking of, though, he was so arrowed for Roonah Quay he was blinkered to everything but the straight of the track before him…. As for myself, Father”—she brought her hands together in a cupping way, as if she were holding something fragile and alive—“I was near crazy with excitement! I can’t tell you!” She laughed richly: “I had this certain picture in my head of a cottage with pink dog-roses and hollyhocks at the door and a cow lying in the shadeof a stand of alders and sheep grazing in a pasture that let down to cliffs and the sea beyond, and inside the cottage, a blue tea-cloth spread ready on a table…. It was all so clear to me, being as it was a dream of the desiring kind—”
    He marvelled at the word she’d chosen to emphasize and nodded his head in a deep, according way.
    “You do see the state I was in!” She met his gaze with luminous eyes. “Well, we went all that day, happy as larks. That night, we sheltered in a rock-set very like a cave. It was at the top of a cliff that let out over the sea…. It’s beyond me to tell you how it stirred us, the air , and, at last-light, the homing seabirds letting out those cries that fill you so with the feel of your own privacy…. Just before he fell off to sleep, Kevin told me, ‘I think we’re getting near to where we belong.’ There was fields of stars over us, and below us waves skurling in and breaking on the rocks in that patterned way you can count by…. When I said my rosary, I could hardly think for the spending of all I was feeling.”
    Her prowess still, he thought: unkillable, emanating from her like heat.
    “Father? I’m going on too much.”
    “No,” he protested, “no. Just the contrary.” And, in the clutch of a near-forgotten sense of intimacy and concentration: “It’s years since I’ve engagedin such close talk with anyone. It makes me—happy.” He might have said “sad” if he hadn’t caught himself in time, then wondered whether, for what he had said, she’d think him ailing.
    But: “A talk of the confiding sort,” she said simply, “it’s not everyone a person can have it with.”
    As to a gift, he responded: “ Thank you, Enda dear, thank you…. Go on for me, please.”
    “Well, the next day it was a race between the sun and us, which would be up first! We had our breakfast of biscuits and water on the road…. The going was harder than it’d been the day before—”
    “The long slopes,” he said.
    “Aye, and the steep,” she nodded solemnly.
    “ But ,” he breathed, the grandeur of the view from the impetuous coastal cliffs springing up in his mind’s eye, “did you not feel