"M. Rickert - Anyway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

think he might cry, but he moves his mouth as if he's sucking on something sour
and continues. "And she says, 'That's what I decided. But then he died anyway.'"

I look at the red spots on the stones. My father makes an odd noise, a sort of
rasping gasp. I look up to the shock of his teary eyes.

"So she tells me that these stones were given to her by her mother. You remember
Grandma Helen, don't you?"

"No, she died beforeтАФ"

"Well, she went nuts too. So you see, it runs in the women of the family. You should
probably watch out for that. Anyway, your mother tells me that her mother gave
her these stones when she got married. There's one for every generation of
Mackeys, that was your mother's name before she married me. There's a stone for
her mother and her mother's mother, and so on, and so on, since before time
began I guess. They weren't all Mackeys, naturally, and anyhow, every daughter
gets them."

"But why?"

"Well, see this is the part that just shows how nuts she was. She tells me, she says,
that all the women in her family got to decide. If they send their son to war and, you
know, agree to the sacrifice, they are supposed to bury the stones in the garden.
Under a full moon or some nonsense like that. Then the boy will die in the war, but
that would be it, okay? There would never be another war again in the whole
world."

"What a fantastic story."

"But if they didn't agree to this sacrifice, the mother just kept the stones, you know,
and the son went to war and didn't die there, he was like protected from dying in the
war but, you know, the wars just kept happening. Other people's sons would die
instead."

"Are you saying that Mom thought she could have saved the world if Tony had died
in Vietnam?"

"Yep."

"But Dad, that's justтАФ"

"I know. Alzheimer's. We didn't know it back then, of course. She really believed this
nonsense too, let me tell you. She told me if she had just let Tony die in Vietnam at
least she could have saved everyone else's sons. There weren't girl soldiers then,
like there are now, you know. Course he just died anyway."

"Tony didn't want to go to Vietnam."

"Well, she was sure she could have convinced him." He waves his hand as though