Sweetwater Creek Read Online Free PDF

offer.”
    Emily nodded but did not turn, and went out of the breakfast room. Behind her, she heard one of the twins say, “Where’s the library? You mean the office? Dad, it looks like a hundred-year-old kennel in there.”
    Emily heard her father’s voice in response, but she did not hear what he said. Whatever it was, it did not matter.
    Her father had decreed that Elvis sleep that night in the kennels with the other dogs so that his guest would not see him coming out of the house. It was not seemly for a champion flushing spaniel to be a house pet. Emily had taken him out to the kennels and settled him into a big one, warm with deep fresh straw, and told him to be quiet for a little while. He was; he watched her anxiously from behind the cage bars when she left, but he did not fuss. When the house was finally dark and quiet she slipped down the fine old spiral staircase, flaking paint now, and out to the kennels where she released him.
    “Shhh,” she whispered. He wagged his stumpy tail and padded silently beside her left heel into the house and up the stairs to her bedroom. Girl and spaniel slept that night as they always had, so deeply curled into each other that they might have been conjoined.
    It was only five hours later that she woke him and took him back to the kennels. She sat down on the straw with him and put her arms around him.
    “You’re going out with Daddy and a real big shot today. Daddy wants to show you off. I won’t be there, but you know how to do everything he’ll ask you.”
    She stopped, seeing in her mind endless cold, dark mornings, with Elvis being loaded into the trailer and taken out to the freezing marsh to bring back to the blind the warm, now-limp ducks who wintered there. She saw him scrambling out of the water with a wood duck in his mouth, wagging his tail and taking it straight to a grinning Walter Parmenter. Emily thought wood ducks the most beautiful birds she had ever seen. Her eyes filled with tears.
    “You just do what you think is right,” she said. He wagged his tail and grinned at her, his yellow eyes full of trust and love. By the time Emily was back in bed a cold red dawn was breaking over the steely river outside her window. Soon she heard the growling of a powerful engine, and her father’s jovial voice welcoming the incoming supermarket tabloid king, who replied in a clipped New England accent.
    She crept to the landing window and looked out. In the chill fog off the river she saw the dim outlines of her father and two brothers standing beside a huge custom hunting vehicle shaking hands with the visitor. Her father’s voice was hearty and booming, not level and almost toneless as it usually was. She cringed in embarrassment. Her brothers faded into the fog and came back with Elvis on a chain lead. The old two-dog aluminum crate already sat in the bed of her father’s Dodge pickup. Just before one of the twins hoisted him up into the crate, Elvis looked up in Emily’s direction and wagged his tail. Emily ran back to her bed and pulled the covers over her head and wept. She did not hear the hunting party move out.
     
    By two o’clock that afternoon most of the dinner preparations were done and the table set. Cleta shoved the enormous wild turkey that Carter had shot and dressed into the oven. The black iron pan of corn bread-and-oyster dressing was ready to be put in an hour before dinnertime. Two pecan pies sat cooling on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table.
    Cleta put on her outsized down-filled jacket and prepared to go home. Emily knew that she would begin cooking for her own household when she got there. She had said there would be roughly eighteen for dinner. Cleta had kin all over the Lowcountry.
    “It doesn’t seem right that you should spend practically a whole day cooking for just us when you’ve got all those folks to feed at home,” Emily had said to her once.
    “Shoot, I’m glad to get home this late,” Cleta said. “Bertha and the girls