Eden Burning Read Online Free PDF

weight that bore upon her. Terror. Outrage. Disbelief.
    In a minute or two it was over. She felt release. She could look up to where he stood above her, where he stood horrified, looking down where she lay naked and weeping.
    “Oh, my God,” he said. Oh, my God.”
    She heard him crashing down the mountain, heard the terror in his feet. A stone struck a rock; branches snapped. The heavy silence fell again. She stood up. I, I, she thought, and stopped crying. She pulled at the skirt, smoothing, smoothing, reached back then for the ribbon that had fastened her hair. In the morning Agnes ties the bow in my room where by eight o’clock the sun strikes between the jalousies and makes a dazzle in the upper right-hand corner of the mirror. Her hands trembled now but she managed a bow, not as neat as Agnes’s. The bow and skirt are self-respect. It is all over and will never happen again, by God, now that I know what I know. But they will punish me for this.
    And she began to run, run as though terror were still at her back, falling over a log where swarming ants stung before she could dash them away, speeding like mad down, down to where the trees ended and high razor grass whipped her legs. Ran and ran.
    “Your dress is all grass stains! Where were you?” Agnes demanded. “Where were you?”
    “I fell. There was a boulder on the path.”
    “Path? What path?”
    “Up the Morne. I went for a walk.”
    “Up the Morne alone? Whatever for?”
    “I wanted to. Isn’t that reason enough?”
    “Reason enough,” she repeated arrogantly, and Agnes stared without answering, silenced by this voice of command which she had never heard from Tee before.
    Of course, the arrogance was only terror and self-defense. For if I let go they will get the truth out of me. But why am I afraid if it was not my fault? But it was mine, partly, wasn’t it? Oh, I could kill him, see him shot before my eyes, torn to pieces, and be glad of it. Still, it was partly my fault. Coaxing, inviting, stupid. Yes.
    It crossed her mind that whenever there had been an accident, a near-drowning or a fall from a horse, they gave you brandy. Père kept it in a tantalus on the sideboard. It had a dreadful taste, bitter and burnt, but maybe it would stop the trembling. So she went to her room with the brandy glass, heard the evening-stir from the kitchen wing when dinner preparations began, heard wood pigeons coo on the lawn, and did not move. The brandy put her outside herself, so that she could see herself, withdrawn and secretive, curled like a cat, with a cat’s wily, secretive face….
    Mustn’t think of it. You can will a thing not to have happened. If you never think of it again, then it never was.
       Père was heard, that day and the next, asking all over the house, “Where the devil is Clyde?” He was furious.
    “He left me with half a wall of unfinished shelves and tools all over the floor. Irresponsible,” he kept saying when, after two weeks, Clyde had not come back.
    “I always told you,” Julia declared over the telephone, “you can’t depend on any of them. And you always said in another time and place he’d be a scholar.”
    “Well, I still think he would. What has that got to do with this?”
    A terrible heat seared the earth for the rest of the month. Then storms came, thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain.
    “What queer, unseasonable weather we are having,” Père remarked. “Is it the weather that’s making you so silent, Tee?”
    “No,” she said.
    I only want to feel the way I felt before, when Clyde and I were friends. I hate the anger that’s in me! Why did he do that? He’s spoiled all the goodness we had. He knew how stupid and ignorant I was, yet he did that to me. And now there’s no one to talk to anymore, not about anything and certainly not about this. I have so many questions. Whom can I ask? No one. No one.
    Inside the house, the walls crushed down. Outside, the dark Morne towered and threatened. The sea