Hill Towns Read Online Free PDF

legacy of the dead Cajun seaman, but without, apparently, his dark fire. I liked them, but we had little to say to each other, and I think they found Trinity and the Mountain somehow effete, a bit rarefied and precious, after the rocky harshness of their Vermont farm. They stayed overnight at the inn and left early the next day, with their invitations to come and stay with them in Vermont ringing in my ears and my assurances that I couldn’t wait ringing in theirs.
    Somehow I knew I’d never go. I don’t think Joe did, though; not then.

    HILL TOWNS / 27
    “Give them a little time,” he said, watching their rental car set off down the road toward the airport in Chattanooga.
    “The Mountain would be pretty esoteric doing to most Ver-monters. ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ is a Four-H slogan to them. Towers belong on TV stations. They’ve never even met a Southerner, and the first one they do meet is marrying their little brother. You’ll get to know them better when we go up for you to meet Ma. On their own turf they’ll be a lot easier with you.”
    “I wish she could have been here,” I said, the old familiar fear starting up in the pit of my stomach. We had not spoken before of leaving the Mountain to go and visit his mother.
    We had not spoken of leaving it at all.
    “I wish your parents could have too,” he said softly.
    “Yes,” I said, my eyes stinging suddenly. I saw them again as they were in the picture I kept on my dresser, only slightly older than I was now, smiling down at me. “This wedding was for my mother, as well as for me. Nobody was laughing at this wedding.”
    He pulled me to him and held me against him, my face feeling the warmth of his body through the T-shirt he’d pulled on hastily to come and see his brother and sister off. Only an hour before my cheek had rested there against his bare skin. I closed my eyes and burrowed my face fiercely into his chest, to scourge away the stinging tears, to feel the sheer heat and solidity of him, miraculously mine now.
    “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home. Bed’s still warm.”
    And we did.
    We had made love for the first time the night before. It was the first time ever for me: remarkable, Joe said, in that age of mandatory egalitarian sexuality among the young.
    Everywhere in those days, even on the Mountain or perhaps especially there, love was being made, in car 28 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    seats and dorm rooms and thickets and behind darkened buildings. On the Steep, you had to step carefully to avoid treading on lovers. Sex hung in the air as thickly as smoke.
    “I can see why you never have, with your parents and all,”
    he said, the first time we talked about it, which was not very long after we met. From the very first, it was hard for us to keep our hands off each other, and we both sensed that some sort of policy about sex had to be arrived at.
    “What do you mean?” I replied. “They loved it. They did it all the time. I heard them, even if I never saw them. They sounded like a couple of wildcats. Practically everybody on the Mountain knew about them; they were famous.”
    “I mean the way they died,” he said hesitantly. “It would scare anybody.” Joe was still awed and reverential about the Faulknerian manner of my parents’ demise.
    “I’m not scared,” I said and believed it. “I don’t even think about it anymore. The reason I don’t do it is because I never met anybody I wanted to do it with until you. And can you imagine trying to screw in the Pierces’ house? We’d turn into pillars of salt the second the tire hit the road.”
    He laughed and pulled me close, and we resumed the hypnotic, infinitely slow touching of each other’s faces and bodies that served us, then, as the prelude to what we both knew would come soon. How could I be afraid after those afternoons and nights spent learning his long, knobbed body by heart and fingertip, inch by inch? There was no part of either of us unknown to, untouched by,