Read Online Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King - Free Book Online Page B

mother’s leg. “Stay,” she tells him.
    Soldier feints left and goes right, which is what he always does, so my mother’s ready for him. She shoves her knee into his side and pins him to the wall. “Go,” she tells me, and I open the door quickly and slip out. I can hear Soldier and my mother jockey forposition along the wall, but from the street, looking in through the window, all I can see are the flowers in the green vase.
    “No!” my mother shouts, and the door opens and she backs her way out. Soldier drives a shoulder past her legs and has his head through the door. But just when it looks as if he’s going to escape, my mother reaches down quickly and flicks his nose with her finger.
    “Go back,” she says, and she flicks him once more, harder this time.
    I’m not sure that flicking is fair. Soldier whimpers and pulls his head back into the shop. My mother shuts the door and locks it.
    “He’s not as bad about the ferry as he used to be,” I tell her.
    “Don’t have the time to fool around,” says my mother.
    “If we had a car,” I say, “we could take him with us.”
    “Talk to your father.”
    Soldier is at the window with his face pressed hard against the glass. When he sees me, he does a little leap and wiggles around. I wait until his back is turned before I follow my mother down to the river.
    “If we had a car, we wouldn’t have to ride the Toilet.”
    My mother doesn’t even glance back. She picks up the pace, and by the time I catch up with her, she’s already standing on the platform. “You want to do it?” she says.
    I wait for her to climb into the bucket before I release the cable. “If we had a car,” I tell her, “I could practise my driving.”
    My mother opens the box at the side of the bucket, takes out the old leather gloves, and puts them on. She pulls hard on the line and the bucket swings out into space, creaking as it pitches and rolls like a log in a flood. “This is the way everybody used to cross the river,” my mother tells me as she pulls us along.
    “The good old days, right?”
    “When Cassie and me were girls, nobody had a car, and this was the only way to get to Truth.”
    The sun is behind the mountains now. The light flattens out across the prairies and the air cools. As my mother hauls us across the river, the fog rises off the Shield, thick and low, and by the time we get to the middle, the river is gone and it feels as though we’re floatingabove the clouds and that if we were to fall, we’d fall for years before we’d find the water.
    “This ferry is a landmark,” says my mother.
    “Cars hadn’t been invented yet, right?”
    My mother stops pulling for a moment and looks over the edge of the bucket. “It’s been here since the beginning of time,” she says. “Did you know that?”
    “The ferry?”
    “No,” she says. “The river.”
    My mother takes the gloves off and puts them on the box. Then she leans back against the side of the bucket and begins to hum. I can see that she’s thinking about singing, which means we could be here all night. I put the gloves on and grab the cable. The bucket jerks and lurches forward.
    “Not so hard,” says my mother.
    I pull hand over hand, trying to keep the pulls smooth and quick. The bucket settles into a rhythm and we slide across the river. My mother begins singing a piece from The Desert Song that is particularly awful. I put my back into it and pull faster.
    My grandmother lives in Bright Water. She has a small house just up from the river, a chicken coop, and a large garden. Beyond the garden, under a row of cottonwoods, is an old silver trailer that my grandfather won in a poker game. My grandmother keeps it tidy in case someone comes visiting whom she doesn’t want in the house.
    The trailer is made out of the same stuff as aluminum foil, and when the sun hits it and sets the shell on fire, it looks like a roasting pan just come out of the oven. But inside it’s dark and cool, and you