Mai at the Predators' Ball Read Online Free Page A

nothing at all, but while I’m passing through, boy am I gonna cause a splash, ’cause you’ve got a chance at that at least, here’s the Reverend announced Yinn, standing near the edge of the sea, now the Reverend will speak, Reverend Stone, where’d they get him Robbie asked Petites Cendres, Fatalité didn’t even believe in religion, first a reverend then prayers, Christ it’s like being in church or some kind of religious meeting with everybody respectfully gathered round him like that, or maybe we just never realized he had faith in something all along, what do you think eh, Fatalité liked simple things, life, a bit of pot, what else . . . dear friends, intoned Reverend Stone, let us pray for our travelling companion Fatalité who always followed his own road, a fanciful one perhaps, but everyone has theirs, the one that has to be followed, straight or twisting and turning or whatever it may be, but God receive him in his charity just the same, and each of us is welcome into the house of the Lord as Fatalité is, for you know my friends, Fatalité was a believer, a true and fervent believer, and sometimes he said to me the Lord lead me where He wills, for I am but the smallest wave on the ocean, yet we must have some enjoyment on this journey of ours, a journey now over, suspended, the passageway now bricked up, the ocean we hear swell so loud Robbie said to Petites Cendres, and you know when Yinn was young he hid his share of sewing machines just so his mother would no longer ruin her fingers with needle points, but she just had to keep taking them back to the stores and reason with the owners, explaining that he was obsessed with making clothes with the shiny machines standing in the shadows of the rich people’s houses where his mother worked for so long as a servant, and obsessed as he was he would one day be an artist, let it be known by all the shop owners or masters of the houses where she explained he really wasn’t a delinquent at all, no thief, just a marvelling, passionate child, nothing more, and that was how he managed to stay out of corrections halls, though she constantly reproached him for it of course, the same way she complained of his marrying Jason, a reverend among us, that just doesn’t fit Robbie told Petites Cendres, but for all that it was well said just the same, Fatalité’s way was his own, and do you think with all these speeches we’re gonna be in time for the ten o’clock show, I mean a reverend with prayers and all, I just didn’t expect all that coming from Fatalité, Robbie said, God I hope they don’t do all this when my turn comes, like when I’m a hundred, I mean I’m not croaking any time soon, and the rose and orchid petals are floating on the waves, it is late and the cocks are still asleep, time for us to go home too, walking in silence, yup time for the ten o’clock show Robbie said. Papa usually writes for an hour after our weekly visit to the library, so if he takes me for a ride in the car instead I’ll wonder why; must be so he can talk to me, but what about, Mai thought, he knows everything all the time, certainly whatever Mama’s told him, but he’s not one of those intruding fathers, no never, but he’ll never say anything, he dared ask me one thing though on that foggy road: this Manuel, you’ve known him for quite a while, haven’t you — no, he didn’t say the business about the Mercedes and you in the car with him, it did happen didn’t it — no, not one of those intruding fathers, you were only eleven then, true he didn’t dare to say that, but here I am next to him in the car and it’s for no good reason, I brashly ask how his book is going and he says it’s not a story but something that really happened, in fact they always are real events he said firmly, it’s Nora’s story he says, completely absorbed in her so I can’t keep his attention on me, I dislike my dad’s heroines because they always take him away from me, and there’s