Somewhere I Belong by Glenna Jenkins Page B

right.
    â€œNothing.” I forced a smile, then slid my lunch tin onto the counter and headed toward the upstairs stairway. I felt so low after what had happened that day, I didn’t want to talk about it.
    â€œPius James,” Ma said. “What’s the matter?”
    Ma was the last person I wanted to talk to. I was beginning to feel that everything about the Island was all her fault. I grabbed the banister and took the stairs two at a time.
    â€œWhat’s up with P.J.?” Alfred piped in.
    â€œMind your own business, Alfred,” I hollered over the upstairs railing. Alfred was always sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Sometimes he was even worse than Helen.
    â€œMr. Dunphy’s making a big deal over P.J. being left-handed,” Larry said, his deep voice travelling up the stairs. “He makes him write with his right hand. Then he gives him grief when it’s messy and sends him up to the dummy desk.”
    I slumped down on my bed feeling sorry for myself. The conversation continued to drift through the grate in the upstairs hall floor.
    â€œNo one ever made a big deal over P.J. being left-handed back home,” Helen said.
    â€œIt’s just some silly superstition,” Granny said. “It’s nonsense.”
    â€œSome idiot got it into their head that if you were left-handed you were in cahoots with the devil and you’d go straight to hell,” Uncle Jim said. “Backward thinkin’ in my view.”
    â€œIs P.J. going to hell, Ma?” Alfred asked.
    â€œNo, Alfred, he isn’t,” Ma said. “Jim, watch your language in front of the children.”
    â€œOh, sorry…I only meant….”
    â€œHow that means a thirteen-year-old boy should get punished is beyond me,” Granny said.
    â€œCharlie likely got into the sauce,” Uncle Jim said. “He gets a few drinks into ’im and he’s foul for days.”
    â€œSurely he wouldn’t be drinking on a Sunday,” Granny said.
    â€œThe day of the week never stopped Charlie,” Uncle Jim replied. “He’ll say his prayers in the morning and be drunk by the afternoon.”
    There was a pause for several moments, then Aunt Gert said, “If it wasn’t that, it would be something else.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Ma asked.
    â€œI don’t suppose you remember when Charlie Dunphy got sick?” Aunt Gert asked.
    â€œSomeone wrote to me about it, in Everett—maybe you did, Mom,” Ma said. “That was years ago.”
    â€œCharlie and I went to school together,” Uncle Jim said. “Percy and I were in the same grade, William was two years ahead o’ us, and Charlie was a year ahead o’ him. But I remember that he was a good fella back then; treated us younger kids just fine, got on swell with everybody. And he was real popular with the ladies.”
    â€œHe was particularly fond of Ellen McGuigan, if I recall,” Aunt Gert said. “Maggie’s mother.”
    â€œI remember that,” Uncle Jim said. “He was set on her; followed her ’round like a hound dog. You hardly saw the one without the other. But that was before Charlie got that terrible fever. Started talkin’ jibberish. Got so hot and seized up we thought he was gonna die. I remember him bein’ carried out the front door on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance. Straight off to Charlottetown, he went. Spent the next six months in an iron lung. Then he came home with weak lungs, a shrivelled leg, and an iron brace.
    â€œEllen stuck around for a while. Then she up and married Frankie MacIntyre. Charlie moped around for a while. Then he got angry.”
    â€œI remember that,” Aunt Gert said. “He was only twenty then. Seemed like he blamed the whole world for him being a cripple and for Ellen taking off on him. That’s how he got that terrible temper.”
    â€œHe’s been that way ever