Diann Ducharme Read Online Free PDF Page B

surrounding island. Even if I couldn’t see the water, I heard the Atlantic Ocean with one ear and the Roanoke Sound with the other. For once, Maddie hadn’t been exaggerating.
    We gathered on the eastern veranda to catch the night breeze. At the request of Mr. and Mrs. Adams, who were leaving us to ourselves, a little black boy came running to light the young men’s cigars with some hot tines.
    With no adult chaperones, it was too intimate there on the dark veranda. I felt as small as a mouse on a patch of moonlit sand, an easy nighttime snack for the preying owls. I crossed my arms over my chest.
    Red said, “I heard about your uncle Jack a couple years ago, Abigail. I’m truly sorry for your loss. I lost a cousin in the war, too. Didn’t know him very well, though. He was from down in Georgia.He got shot straight through his skull.” He puffed on a cigar, and the smoke blew quickly away into the night. “It’s morbid, having a dead relative in the family.”
    “Yes, it is.” I nodded, uncomfortable talking about my dead uncle in front of this group. I touched my reticule, buried inside my green skirts.
    After an awkward silence, Red asked, “How’s your plantation doing? I hear tell it’s rough going for planters like your daddy these days. Bankruptcies left and right.”
    Alice asked, “You used to own over a hundred slaves, isn’t that about right? And they all ran off, I heard.”
    Maddie, with a little swing of her curls, stopped her conversation with George Wakefield to eavesdrop. I heard the lonely call of a gull sliding over the ocean.
    I cocked my chin out and said, “Some of our best people stayed on after the war, so we’re making out. In fact, we built a cottage, over on the ocean side.”
    They all twittered and rustled over that like invisible birds in a bush. It got me to wondering what everyone was saying about us behind our backs. I glanced to where I thought our cottage stood, alone on the sand, but I couldn’t see a single thing in the darkness.
    The black boy broke the silence when he banged out the door with a tray full of silver cups. I smelled the bourbon as he stood in front of me with his offerings, and I shook my head unconvincingly. I’d never tasted alcohol in my life, but at just that moment I wanted nothing more than to guzzle a cup or two down. But the image of Daddy at breakfast, chasing his customary slice of pie with two shots of whiskey, made me think twice.
    I wondered what people like the Adamses and the Taylors thought of us. I knew that our situation didn’t look good. I knew that Sinclair House appeared dark and haunted, with its cobwebbed windowsmissing draperies, paint peeling off the moldy shutters, weeds growing in the flower beds. It resembled a sleeping giant, about to fall over with a mighty crash into the dusty earth.
    Everything that my English ancestors had worked for, everything that my daddy and my uncle Jack had worked for, was disappearing. Maybe it was inevitable, the decline of our plantation. I’d like to blame its demise on the death of my uncle, but really, it was the death of the South that was to blame.
    Still, the two deaths are always intertwined in my head. Uncle Jack was as much a part of the land as a tobacco leaf. He grew up in the house; he was even born, like my daddy before him, in the master bedroom, in a mahogany four-poster bed.
    Even our slaves, the same ones who couldn’t wait to leave us when the war ended, cried when Uncle Jack was buried, even though Daddy wouldn’t let them come to the services. I could hear them late that same night, singing the saddest African songs in low, pained voices. Their singing kept me up almost the whole night, even after the songs had long ended.
    Suddenly I couldn’t for a moment longer bear sitting with Maddie and her friends, who were getting progressively drunker. I made an excuse about being tired, so Maddie, with a puckered smile, ordered one of their sleepy servants to drive me home on