The Loons
Margarel Laurence
1、Just b班级制度
elow Manawaka, where the Wachakwa River ran brown and noisy over the pebbles , the scrub oak and grey-green willow and chokecherry bushes grew in a den thicket . In a clearing at the centre of the thicket stood the Tonnerre family's shack. The basis at this dwelling was a small square cabin made of poplar poles and chinked with mud, which had been built by Jules Tonnerre some fifty years before, when he came back from Batoche with a bullet in his thigh, the year that Riel was hung and the voices of the Metis entered their long silence. Jules had only intended to stay the winter in the Wachakwa Valley, but the family was still there in the thirties, when I was a child. As the Tonnerres had incread, their ttlement had been added to, until the clearing at the foot of the town hill was a chaos of lean-tos, wooden packing cas, warped lumber, discarded car types, ramshackle chicken coops , tangled strands of barbed wire and rusty tin cans.
2、The Tonnerres were French half breeds, and among themlves they spoke a patois that was neither Cree nor French. Their English was broken and full of obscenities. They did not belong among the Cree of the Galloping Mountain rervation, further n鱼类简笔画
orth, and they did not belong among the
Scots-Irish and Ukrainians of Manawaka, either. They were, as my Grandmother MacLeod would have put it, neither flesh, fowl, nor good salt herring . When their men were not working at odd jobs or as ction hands on
the C.P. R. they lived on relief. In the summers, one of the Tonnerre youngsters, with a face that emed totally unfamiliar with laughter, would knock at the doors of the town's brick hous and offer for sale a lard -pail full of bruid wild strawberries, and if he got as much as a quarter he would grab the coin and run before the customer had time to change her mind. Sometimes old Jules, or his son Lazarus, would get mixed up in a Saturday-night brawl , and would hit out at whoever was nearest or howl drunkenly among the offended shoppers on Main Street, and then the Mountie would put them for the night in the barred cell underneath the Court Hou, and the next morning they would be quiet again.
3、PiquetteTonnerre, the daughter of Lazarus, was in my class at school. She was older than I, but she had failed veral grades, perhaps becau her attendance had always been sporadic and her interest in schoolwork negligible . Part of the reason she had misd a lot of school was that she had had tuberculosis of the bone, and had once spent many months in hospital. I knew this becau my father was the doctor who had looked after her. Her sickness was almost the only thing I knew about
her, however. Otherwi, she existed for me only as a vaguely embarrassing prence, with her hoar voice and her clumsy limping walk and her grimy cotton dress that were always miles too long. I was neither friendly nor unfriendly towards her. She dwelt and moved somewhere wit古牧狗
hin my scope of vision, but I did not actually notice her very muchgolfer
until that peculiar summer when I was eleven.
4、"I don't know what to do about that kid." my father said at dinner one evening. "PiquetteTonnerre, I mean. The damn bone's flared 拉肚子喝什么
up again. I've had her in hospital for quite a while now, and it's under control all right, but I hate like the dickens to nd her home again."
5、"Couldn't you explain to her mother that she has to rest a lot?" my mother said.
6、"The mother's not there" my father replied. "She took off a few years back. Can't say I blame her. Piquette cooks for them, and she says Lazarus would never do anything for himlf as long as she's there. Anyway, I don't think she'd take much care of herlf, once she got back. She's only thirteen, after all. Beth, I was thinking—What about taking her up to Diamond Lake with us this summer?
A couple of months rest would give that bone a much better chance."
7、My mother looked stunned.
8、"But Ewen -- what about Roddie and Vanessa?"
9、"She's not contagious ," my father said. "And it would be company for Vanessa."
10、"Oh dear," my mother said in distress, "I'll bet anything she has nits in her hair."
11、"For Pete's sake," my father said crossly, "do you think Matron would let her stay in the hospital for all this time like that? Don't be silly, Beth. "
12、Grandmother MacLeod, her delicately featured face as rigid as a cameo , now brought her mauve -veined hands together as though she were about to begin prayer.
13、"Ewen, if that half breed youngster comes along to Diamond Lake, I'm not going," she announced. "I'll go to Morag's for the summer."
14、I had trouble in stifling my urge to laugh, for my mother brightened visibly and quickly tried to hide it. If it came to a choice between Grandmother MacLeod and Piquette, Piquette would win hands down, nits or not.
15、"It might be quite nice for you, at that," she mud. "You haven't en Morag for over a year, an
d you might enjoy being in the city for a while. Well, Ewen dear, you do what you think best. If you think it would do Piquette some good, then we' II be glad to have her, as long as she behaves herlf."
16、So it happened that veral weeks later, when we all piled into my father's old Nash, surrounded by suitcas and boxes of provisions and toys for 雷锋的观后感
my ten-month-old brother, Piquette was with us and Grandmother MacLeod, miraculously, was not. My father would only be staying at the cottage for a couple of weeks, for he had to get back to his practice, but the rest of us would stay at Diamond Lake until the end of August.
17、Our cottage was not named, as many were, "Dew Drop Inn" or "Bide-a-Wee," or "Bonnie Doon”. The sign on the roadway bore in austere letters only our name, MacLeod. It was not a large cottage, but it was on the lakefront. You could look out the windows and e, through the filigree of the spruce trees, the water glistening greenly as the sun caught it. All around the cottage were ferns, and sharp-branched raspberrybushes, and moss that had grown o宇智波鼬壁纸
ver fallen tree trunks, If you looked carefully among the weeds and grass, you could find wild strawberry plants which were in white flower now and in another month would bear fruit, the fragrant globes hanging like miniaturescarlet lanterns on the thin hairy stems. The two grey squirrels were still there, gossiping at
us from the tall spruce beside the cottage, and by the end of the summer they would again be tame enough to take pieces of crust from my hands. The broad mooantlers that hung above the back door were a little more bleached and fissured after the winter, but otherwi everything was the same. I raced joyfully around my kingdom, greeting all the places I had not en for a year. My brother, Roderick, who had not been born when we were here last summer, sat on the car rug in the sunshine and examined a brown spruce cone, meticulously turning it round and round in his small and curious hands. My mother and father toted the luggage from car to cottage, exclaiming over how well the place had wintered, no broken windows, thank goodness, no apparent damage from storm felled branches or snow.
