Summer Lightning (24 page)

Edith felt sure Jeff would come to love whomever he married—in time. It might be far from perfect at first, yet his kisses proved that he was ready for at least part of marriage. She did not imagine that with his loving heart he could spend any time in company with a wife without offering her affection. Then he would initiate his wife into those mysteries of marriage that wives and husbands never discussed with anyone but each other,

Edith thought about this future wife. For some reason, this woman refused to take on the appearance of either Miss Climson or Miss Albans. Surely this faceless someone must be happy with such a wonderful husband. Jeff was startlingly handsome. Edith knew how kind he was firsthand. He was prosperous, generous, and physically as well-proportioned as any Greek statue.

Shifting a little on the carpet, Edith tried to focus on Jeff’s other good qualities but kept returning to contemplation of the splendid physique that had been revealed while she was recovering from being frightened by the dead snake.

How smooth his body had looked, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. Her fingers curled into her palm as she recalled how his chest had been so firm and hard when her fingers brushed over it. The sunlight had picked out the gold glint of the hair that spread across the division of his chest muscles. With her mind’s eye, she followed the trailing line over his Hat stomach and down into the waistband of his jeans. Licking her lips unconsciously, she found herself wondering what existed behind those silver-toned buttons. If a man’s body was so different from her own in so many ways, how else might it differ?

“Is she okay?” Maribel asked Louise in a whisper. “Her face is all red.”

Edith realized she’d closed her eyes. “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, snapping them open. “I’m just not used to sitting on the floor. I think my legs . . . limbs have fallen asleep.”

She stood up, exaggerating her stiffness. She thought savagely, In future, my imagination had better feed off fiction alone!

“Come here, my dears,” she said, seating herself on the window seat. The air off the glass felt deliciously cool on her hot cheeks. “I’ll tell you a story, if you like.”

“What story?” Maribel pulled herself up onto Edith’s lap with a grasp of her full skirt.

“Is it from the Bible?” Louise asked, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

“Don’t you like Bible stories?”

“They’re all right. I like the ones in Daniel, like Neb . . . Nebu-can-sneezer’s dreams. But . . .”

“But what?” Edith asked.

“Well, nobody will tell me what ‘beget’ means. Al . . . someone says it means ‘found’ but why were all those people lost?”

Edith recalled being sent to bed without supper for wanting to know how she should begat, since her aunt told her to always behave as the Bible instructed. “Begat just means father. One man is father to another man, so they say, A begat B.”

“Oh, I see. Quicker.”

“That’s right. You see, a long time ago, people didn’t have printing presses and lots of people to do work like printing a Bible. So the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelations was written out by hand.”

“Golly,” Louise said, impressed. “I had to write a twenty-five-word essay last spring and it almost killed me.”

“And every word had to be right. So they used some shorter words like ‘begat’ instead of ‘father of again and again.”

“I can print,” Maribel stuck in. “I can print real good.”

“You cannot,” Louise said automatically. “Only the first couple of letters in the alphabet. I can print them all. I can do script too, some.”

Maribel’s lower lip began to quiver. “Can too print. A—B —C. And G too.”

Edith’s arm tightened around the little girl’s shoulders. “That’s a lot,” she said. “Before I go, I’ll help you with some of the others. You’ve got all the hard ones already. Can you say the whole alphabet? Let’s do it together.”

“What about the story?” Louise wanted to know.

“Alphabet first, story after.”

She told them a shortened version of
Ivanhoe.
Then she told them about Lochinvar and even recited some of Scott’s narrative poem. To her amazement, Louise repeated the lines back to her although half an hour had passed since she heard them. After the children pleaded for one more story, Edith described some of the adventures ol’ Robin Hood, whom she’d mentioned during Ivanhoe. Her throat was sore by then, and she was glad when Sam announced lunch, even if without cake.

Jeff came in late, and dropped down into the chair next to her without speaking. His sleeves and shirt were wet and molded to his form. Crystal droplets hung in his light hair. He pushed back a damp hank that hung in his eyes. Edith had to force her gaze away from him.

After helping Maribel reach the jam, Edith asked, “Jeff, you said something about church today?”

“Tonight,” Sam answered after a little silence. “Wednesday evenings Mr. Armstrong runs a prayer meeting. They’re so popular a couple of the other churches have started them.”

“So Mr. Armstrong isn’t the only . . . ?”

“Lord no,” Louise said. Under her father and grandfather’s austere glances, the little girl hastily apologized. “Sorry, Cousin Edith, I spoke without thinking.”

“That’s all right.” How had her aunt reacted to Edith’s taking the Lord’s name in vain? She didn’t want to recall the coldness she’d had to endure. Her aunt had never struck her. She’d never needed to. A simple “I see” could raise welts.

“In about the last five or six years, we’ve had a couple of new churches start up. There’s even one for the black folks, those that don’t go where their white families go. For a while there, the churches looked like they were going to get awful competitive, but they straightened out their territories. God help any new families who come to town, however.”

“You make it sound like competing businesses.”

“Isn’t it?” Jeff said, lifting a fork to his mouth.

“We don’t go to church much,” Louise volunteered.

“I like the singing,” her sister put in, and began to warble “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” softly but very clearly.

Jeff looked sheepish. “We go,” he said. “Sometimes.”

“I see,” Edith said.

“When we want to,” he responded, glancing at her with a rising anger in his eyes.

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I’m not explaining. I’m telling you we go to church when we feel like it. But if it’s Sunday and the sun is shining, I think there’s better ways for children to learn about God than sitting in a pew!”

“I spent every Sunday in a pew,” Edith said. She sipped from her glass of cloudy lemonade. Then she raised her eyes to his angry ones and said simply, “I agree with you.”

“Oh.” Jeff took another bite of chicken. “Oh.”

“Why are they arguing?” Maribel whispered to Louise.

“I don’t know.” Louise turned to Sam. “Why are Cousin Edith and Daddy arguing?”

“‘Cause they like each other would he my guess.”

The little girls nodded, obviously approving of this answer.

Edith colored. Jeff kept on eating, only the burning tips of his ears giving away his emotions. “Really good chicken, Dad,” he said in a few minutes.

“Excellent,” Edith said. “I can’t remember when I had better. And there’s so much of it.”

Jeff turned in his chair to look into her face. “Eat all you can while you’re here,” he said bluntly. “You’re too thin.”

“I beg your pardon?” She was not used to hearing comments on her appearance. And such an unflattering remark was not at all what she hoped to hear from Jeff Dane.

“Scrawny, spare, skinny. Take your choice.” He leaned closer to her. His thigh pressed against hers. Her jerked back. “I know you haven’t had enough to eat for a long time. So fill up, every day, three times a day or more.”

“Mr. Dane, what I eat and when are none of your . . . I am your guest and I thank you for your kindness to me, but if you’d be so good as to . . .”

“I don’t want you to thank me for my kindness. Here,” he spooned up an extra helping of mashed potatoes and plopped them on her plate. “Put some butter on that and get it down.”

“Mr. Dane!” Edith tossed her napkin on the table and stood up, all in one seamless motion. “Please excuse me!”

“Nice going, son,” Sam said as Edith stalked out of the room.

“Nice going,” Maribel echoed.

“Skinny!” Edith fumed as she closed her bedroom door. Even as angry as she was, long training kept her from slamming it.

“Scrawny!” She sat on the bed but couldn’t stay still.

“Thin!” Catching sight of herself in the mirror, Edith frowned. This far away, she could see all of her person.

The full-skirted dress, the prettiest thing she’d ever worn, had been a pleasure to put on. The muslin, embroidered all over with tiny blue flowers, had a soft sheen and skimmed over her body without any sensation of weight. Edith had practically skipped down the stairs this morning, just to feel the fabric swaying around her.

Now, however, she saw that the looseness of the fit emphasized her slender waist, while the rest of it hung about her like a sack. Her bony wrists emerged nakedly from the ruffled sleeves. Beneath the full skirt, her ankles looked too frail to support her. Not to mention that the new, less harsh hairstyle she’d tried today only made her cheekbones stand out, turning her eyes into saucers.

Edith acknowledged in shame that she had hoped to please Jeff by these changes. She writhed to remember how she had primped in this mirror, trying her hair this way and that, and pressing her lips together hard to make them pinker. It seemed only right that her pathetic efforts to ensnare Jeff had brought his censure down upon her.

Approaching the mirror, Edith shook her head at her folly. It seemed so typical that she could not tempt him when she wanted to. For she confessed to her reflection that she had indeed been trying to rouse the brute beast that supposedly slept in every man’s soul. All she’d managed to awaken was his pity, something she could very well get along without.

A rapping at her door made her call, “Come in.” Realizing her eyes were wet, she knuckled away the tears just before the door opened.

Louise stood there, agitation plain in her twisting hands and stuttering voice. “Please, C-Cousin Edith. It’s Maribel.”

“What’s the matter?” She began to grow anxious, pushing aside her misery.

“She’s in the root cellar and I can’t budge the door.”

“The root cellar? What on earth is she doing there?” Edith hurried down the stairs.

“She wanted an apple. Grandpa told her she couldn’t but she wanted one awful bad. . . .”

“Where
is
your grandfather? And your father?”

“Please, hurry! It’s awful dark in there.”

They rushed outside, Edith’s skirt trailing across the wet grass. She gave no thought, however, to her beautiful kid shoes. The important thing was to reach Maribel.

Two doors of wooden planks lay across the opening. Earth had been piled up and then faced with boards to make an entry. A latch had fallen across the two handles. Leaning forward, Edith slid the latch away.

The door wasn’t that heavy, but Edith supposed it must have seemed so to Louise. It was awkward, though, swinging crookedly to the side. Putting her foot on the first step that lead down into the darkness, Edith called, “Maribel?”

“She must be in the back, where the apples are,” Louise suggested. “At least she won’t be so frightened. Maybe if you go down there . . .”

Edith nodded. Slowly, watching her footing, she descended. “Maribel, dear. Come out now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She wished she’d brought a lamp. There was only dirt underfoot but the floor was uneven. Her voice fell strangely flat as she moved farther away from the shaft behind her. Looking up, she called, “I don’t see . . .”

Abruptly, the light went out as the cellar door slammed down. “Louise!” Edith called.

“Yes, Cousin Edith?”

“Are you all right, dear?”

“Oh, yes, Cousin Edith. But I still can’t move this door.”

“Where’s your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s your grandfather?”

“I don’t know.”

Edith uttered a sigh of vexation. How like men, she thought. But then she smiled, for it struck her suddenly that she sounded like a woman with a thousand years’ experience of their sex, rather than a girl with but a week’s knowledge.

“Well, go and find them, like a good girl,” Edith said.

“You’ll wait right there?”

“Absolutely.” What choice did she have?

After a moment or two of silence, Edith called again, “Louise? Are you still there?”

Silence was her only answer. Edith crossed her arms across her chest. The air in the cellar was dank and cool. The temperature chilled her like a cool cloth dripping on her skin. It was refreshing, compared to the heat and humidity of the day.

The smell, however, reminded Edith of the fresh earth of a burial. She shivered, not entirely from the cold. Remembering that Maribel was supposed to be down here, she called her name.

As her eyes adjusted to the little streamers of light that filtered through the slats of the door, Edith peered around her. A few large barrels took up some of the room, and these had two or three smaller ones resting in the spaces between their rounded sides. Strings of onions and bags of potatoes hung from pegs driven into the supporting
floor beams.

Moving farther into the darkness, Edith realized this was a larger space than she had first thought. It must run under half the house.

That gave her an idea. Perhaps there was a way into the house from the cellar. It made sense that Sam’s wife and Gwen hadn’t wanted to tramp all the way around the house every time they wanted a carrot or a turnip. What about in the winter? They must surely have rebelled at the thought of getting all bundled up just to obtain a few vegetables.

After bumping into two dirty partitions, Edith decided she would recommend a few things to Jeff’s next wife. It was just as she was deciding that electric lighting was really a necessity for mankind that too much light suddenly filled the cellar.

Once more Edith found her eyes watering. She stumbled toward the opening. A broad-shouldered figure fell across her vision like a shadow.