Eden Burning Read Online Free PDF Page B

glittered harshly. And there was no place in which to hide from loneliness, none, anywhere.
       When the storms ceased, the heat came back to punish the land all that long, long summer. Tee woke in the mornings with her hair wet on the pillow, although she had pinned the mass of it to the top of her head. She sat up and, feeling dizzy, lay back again. Things buzzed in her head, buzzed and throbbed like crickets, like frogs. Saliva gathered in her mouth.
    “I feel like vomiting,” she said when Agnes came in.
    “Again! It’s pork. I tell them and tell them not to serve pork in this weather, but nobody listens to me.”
    À strong scent came from the vétiver mats on the floor. “No, it’s these mats…. They’re sickening.”
    “They never bothered you before! Why, they’ve a sweet smell! Tee!” Agnes cried sharply, for Tee’s nightgown had fallen off her shoulders, revealing breasts grown noticeably larger. Tee retched in the basin and fell back weakly, the mound of her belly stretching a nightgown too tight.
    “Let me see!” commanded Agnes. “Don’t be silly, you’ve got nothing the rest of us haven’t got! Oh, my God!” Her mouth opened in an enormous O. She pressed her handagainst her lips, swallowed, and then, after a moment, spoke very quietly, very deliberately. “Listen to me, I’m asking you: When did you last have—you know—when was it last?”
    “I’m not sure. Well, May, probably.”
    “Oh, my God! Not since May?”
    “I think so.”
    “You think? You don’t know? You don’t know what’s the matter with you? You haven’t looked at yourself?”
    “What is it? What, Agnes, what?”
    “Jesus and all the saints, what is it, she asks! You’re going to have a baby! You don’t know that? Who was it? Where have you been?” Agnes screamed, shaking at Tee so that the gold earhoops swung. “Why, you’ve hardly been off this place since we came here!”
    Tee could not speak for terror, and Agnes’s eyes spread wide, searching the girl’s face. “It’s not—it couldn’t be—it’s not that devil Clyde? Talk! Talk!”
    Tee stood up, swaying.
    “Oh, my God, I told you, Tee, I told you—” And putting her arms out, the woman took the girl in, offering strong shoulders, soft breasts, incoherent comfort.
    “You guessed this, didn’t you? You must have. And were afraid to think it. Oh, you fool, you poor baby, poor child … that devil … what are we to do with you?”
    She heard herself wail, “I didn’t know…. Nobody ever told me.”
    And Agnes keened, “Oh, what are we to do with you? Dear God in heaven, what?”
    The woman’s terror infected the girl, so that gooseflesh rose on her arms and her teeth chattered.
    “You’re freezing, look at you!” Agnes drew the blanket over Tee. “In all this heat you’re freezing.” She rubbed Tee’s back. She swayed and lamented. “Men! I told you—”
    “You didn’t tell me—”
    “You’re right, I didn’t tell you enough. Men! You can’t trust them, not the best of them, not any one of them. Andthe sooner a girl’s taught that, the better for her. Oh, but this world’s a rotten hard place for women, yes, yes—”
    “What’s going to happen to me, Agnes?”
    “I don’t know, but I know one thing, I’m going to take care of you, don’t you fret a minute about that. Agnes will take care of you.”
    There, in the flowered room, in the ordinary morning, with the ordinary morning sounds of voices, mowers, and birds beyond the windows, the two cried themselves out, the girl weeping fear, the woman, wrath.
    Like an animal afraid to leave its cage, Tee cowered in the room all week. Agnes brought food on a tray, but she could not eat.
    “What does Père say?” she kept asking.
    “What is there to say? His heart is broken.”
    “Will he ever talk to me again?”
    “He will, he will.”
    She had to know what was going on, what was going to happen. Standing behind her door when it was ajar she could barely hear