Read The Day the Falls Stood Still for Free Online Page B

sun is too hot or the air too thick with humidity or the flies too bothersome. This morning, she says the day is too bright. The sun has in fact washed much of the color from the sky, leaving it a cloudless, faded blue, and I will have to squint away the light reflecting from the page as I read. But still I insist we move outdoors. I will not begin reading until we do. And Mother, well aware of Dr. Galveston’s prescription for sunshine, says, “Out with the both of you.” Then she is off to Toronto by steamboat in search of yard goods, leaving me alone with Isabel. Once, a day on our own would have meant frivolity, an adventure plotted by Isabel that I would have anticipated for a week. Would she fluster a hack driver by speaking to him in a language she was making up on the spot? Would she have made arrangements for us to meet up with a couple of the older brothers we had met in the academy parlor?
    Instead she slouches on the chaise I dragged out to the veranda and complains when I place a dish of raspberries in her lap. Such has been the case for anything other than her beloved strawberries, and they were finished a week ago. When she finally swallows a berry, I seat myself in the wicker rocking chair and open A Tale of Two Cities.
    Yesterday we finished The Hound of the Baskervilles. I loved it, at least until Holmes proved there was no supernatural black hound. I disliked that science trumped superstition in the end, that the common folk with their unfounded beliefs were made to look like fools. “You’ve gone soft in the head, believing in the miraculous,” Isabel said.
    “I’ve always believed in miracles.”
    “So, same as God, you believe in magic black dogs?”
    I slid a hand along the wicker arm of my chair. “Sister Leocrita would call that blasphemy.”
    “Since when have you bothered about Sister Leocrita? Wasn’t she the one who told you your bits of hovering tin were nothing more than tired eyes?”
    “Make fun of me all you want. I know what I’ve seen.”
    She is silent throughout the first two chapters of A Tale of Two Cities, which is usual enough with her tendency to nod off. Hoping another paragraph or two will do the trick, I begin the third:
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
    If she slept, I could finish the buttonholes Mother left out for me. I glance in her direction. “Go on,” she says.
A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
    “It sounds like Dickens has figured out a thing or two,” she says.
    I shrug. The words strike me as grim, nothing it will do Isabel a bit of good to debate.
    “All humans are mysteries to one another,” she says.
    “I’m not so sure.”
    “Do you think you know me?” She flicks a fallen leaf from the chaise.
    “Yes,” I say. But the lighthearted sister I once knew seems almost entirely gone, replaced by the infuriating girl sitting with me now.
    “You don’t.”
    “I want to,” I say, closing the book. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
    “Keep reading,” she says.
    And I do, though lounging on the veranda has begun to seem indulgent with Mother bent over the sewing machine and the notices in every newspaper discouraging idleness. There are bandages to be rolled, socks and scarves and wristlets to be knit, flannel shirts and pillowcases to be sewn.
    A short while later I glimpse a figure approaching on River Road. I raise the book from my knees, so I only have to lift my eyes slightly to keep watch. Once I make out a tall fellow with a bedroll and a flat cap, I stumble through a few more paragraphs, losing my spot on the page several times.
    Since my vigil