A Spear of Summer Grass Read Online Free PDF

with little grace and less enthusiasm, and I suspected some money might have changed hands. But I fixed my fancy Prince of Wales feathers to my hair and rode to the palace in a carriage and made my double curtsey to the king and queen. The next night I went to my first debutante ball and two days later I eloped with a black-haired boy from Devonshire whose family almost disowned him for marrying an American with nothing but scandal for a dowry.
    Johnny didn’t care. All he wanted was me, and since all I wanted was him, it worked out just fine. The Colonel came through with a handsome present of cash and Johnny had a little family money. He wanted to write, so I bought him a typewriter as a wedding present and he would sit at our little kitchen table pecking away as I burned the chops. He read me his articles and bits of his novel every evening as I eventually figured out how not to scorch things, and by the time his book was finished, I had even learned to make a proper soufflé. We were proud of each other, and everything we did seemed new, as if it was the first time it had ever been done. Whether it was sex or prose or jam on toast, we invented it. There was something fine about our time together, and when I took the memories out to look at them, I peered hard to find a shadow somewhere. Did the mirror crack when I sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him shave? Did I spill salt when I fixed his eggs? Did an owl come to roost in the rafters of the attic? I had been brought up on omens, nursed on portents. Not from Mossy. She was a new creation, a modern woman, although I had spied her telling her rosary when she didn’t think I saw.
    But there were the others. The Colonel’s withered old mother, Granny Miette, her keeper Teenie, and Teenie’s daughter, Angele. They were the guardians of my childhood summers at Reveille, and they kept the old ways. They knew that not everything is as it seems and that if you look closely enough, you can see the shadows of what’s to come in the bright light of your own happiness. Time is slower in Louisiana, each minute dripping past like cold molasses. Plenty of time to see if you want to and you know where to look.
    I never looked in those days with Johnny. When I opened a closet and something fluttered out of the corner of my eye, I told myself it was just moths and nothing more, and I hung lavender and cedar to drive them away. When I peered in a cupboard and saw a shadow scurry past, I said it was mice and bought a cat, the meanest mouser I could find. I sent to Reveille for golden strands of vetiver and carried the dry grass in a small bundle in my pocket. It was the scent of sunlight and home, pungent and earthy and cedar-green-smelling, and I sewed a handful of it in the uniform that Johnny put on in 1914.
    The uniform came back—or at least pieces of it did. Germans blew him to bits during the Battle of the Marne, and I don’t remember much of what happened after that. A black curtain has fallen over that time, and I don’t ever pull it back to look behind. It’s a place I don’t visit in my memories, and it was a long while before I came out of it. When I emerged, I chopped off my hair and hemmed up my skirts and set out to see what I’d been missing in the world. It had been an interesting ride, no doubt about it, but things had gotten a little out of hand to land me with banishment to Africa. I had handled my affairs with style and even a little discretion from time to time. But the world could be a hard place on a girl who was just out for a little fun, and I felt mightily put upon as the train churned into the station at Marseilles.
    At the sight of the ship, my spirits perked right up. I had had a choice of sailing with a British outfit or later with a German one, but I had refused point blank to cross to Mombasa with a bunch of Krauts. I was still holding a bit of a grudge over Johnny and wasn’t inclined to give them a penny of my money. Sailing a week