He would trade five more of them and the better portion of his toes for a moment of peace and quiet. They came in bunches, the girls, as if they couldn’t bear to be alone, even for a moment. Triplets first, then a set of twins bracketing each side of the Candorlys’ only boy, and finally the baby, Elmira. Candorly insisted little Elm would be the last, but Mina Candorly was an indisputably healthy woman with biceps the size of house bricks and hips the width of an oxcart, who loved her husband very much and her children even more, so no one was holding their breath. Least of all Colm.Įxcept when they made him. pinning him down near the meadows outside the Candorly farm and thrusting handfuls of pollen-packed posies into his face until he turned red and blew s not all over himself. “They do it because they love you,” his mother would say. Which was true for the five older ones, but not for the three who came after. They treated Colm like a child despite the fact that he was twelve already and taller than most of them (save the triplets, who were well into their teens). Only baby Elmira deigned to leave him alone, though she was nearly walking already and would soon join her sisters in their daily persecution of the only boy in the house. Already they used her to trick him, making her cry by pinching her legs so that he would come check on her, and then cornering him so they could braid his hair. A flop of wheat-colored locks trimmed close by his mother’s only shears, hard to stick a ribbon in. “Don’t complain to me,” Colm’s father would tell him. Some days, Colm would have preferred the wolves. It was a daily gauntlet he was forced to run-the cutesy names and the rolling eyes, the stealing of his underwear (he once found it hanging on the fence for the whole village of Felhaven to see), the incessant giggling about nothing funny at all. Colm spent most of his time in hiding, lurking in shadows, escaping into the nearby woods, always planning for his next escape. Hiding in the cupboard, scrunching his body and wedging beneath the usually empty shelves. Covering himself in leaves as a disguise and holding his breath as the gaggle of Candorly girls traipsed by. He could count on both hands the number of times they locked him in the cellar (fewer than ten, at least), until he taught himself to pick the lock using a hairpin that he kept hidden beneath the stairs. He teased them mercilessly at the table, where the presence of parents kept their retribution in check. He had learned to pilfer small items from his sisters’ dressers and the secret wooden boxes they stashed under their beds. He had even learned to steal the pins and combs right out of their hair. He used these little treasures as collateral, wards against future torture. “Let me go and I will give you back your brush.” “Give me back my pants or you will never see your rag doll again.” He loved them, of course they were his sisters, and the torment was just their idea of affection and family bonding, but it still taught him a few tricks in the arts of subterfuge and avoidance. With so many sisters, it was simply a matter of survival.įor Colm’s parents, the challenge was of a different sort. Feeding a family of eleven on a shoe cobbler’s salary required the most precarious balancing of coin.
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