Sweetwater Creek Read Online Free PDF Page B

will be so hungry they’ll have made up the dressin’ just so they can cook some extra and gobble it, an’ all the men will have been into the shine since noon. Nobody be ’specially hungry, and half of ’em be too drunk to care if I’m late. Works out real good.”
    Now she said, “Y’all have a happy Thanksgiving. I sho’ do hope things work out for Mr. Walter.”
    Her expression said that she had her doubts on this matter.
    Emily and Jenny took rags and brooms and silver polish and the bulbous old Hoover and went down the hall to the small room that served as office, trophy room, refuge, and sometime puppy pen for Walter Parmenter. Emily was seldom invited into it. Walt Junior and Carter sometimes closed themselves in with their father, but usually it was Walter’s domain alone. Cleta dusted and Hoovered occasionally, but was not allowed to touch anything else.
    “My God, it looks like the stock room in a feed store,” Jenny Raiford said. “If Mr. Gotrocks comes in here he’ll choke to death.”
    Dust swirled in the dim light, puffed up from the wrinkled oriental throw rugs, and poured like smoke from the heavy, faded damask draperies that were pulled shut over the tall french doors onto the porch. The mahogany paneling and shelving, once thought unrivaled in quality among the river plantations, were now felted with dust. Doors, window frames, and mantel, all carved with sunbursts, fans, and Chippendale gougework, were a uniform smoky gray from years of fires in the small grate. The floor of the fireplace itself was completely buried under a sooty black and silvery gray drift of ash. The shelves were jammed with tarnished trophies and faded ribbons and photographs of grime-dimmed spaniels. Sacks of dog food and cedar bedding and boxes that had held whelping bitches covered most of the wide-planked cypress floor. Dusty scrapbooks were piled on the twin leather Morris chairs beside the fireplace. Walter’s desk, under the tall windows, was piled chin-high with account books, legal pads, ancient hunting magazines, and yellowing newspapers. A roll of toilet paper sat on top of the heap.
    “Where should we put the silver tray of benné seed biscuits and the sherry? On his desk beside the toilet paper or over there on that fifty-pound sack of Eukanuba?” Emily said, beginning to laugh helplessly.
    “I could tell him where to put it,” Jenny said, beginning to laugh too. It was impossible not to.
    Two hours later the shelves were cleared out, the sack of dog food was moved to the back porch, the rugs and furniture and drapes were Hoovered, Walter’s desk was cleared and polished, the fireplace was clean, and a fire had been freshly laid and ready to light. Jenny brought in a large copper vase of bittersweet berries, and Emily was finishing up the silver frames of the photographs on the mantelpiece.
    She picked up the last one, a large photo of a beautiful, unremembered Boykin, and the photo slipped out onto the floor, revealing another behind it. Emily took it over to the now-sparkling windows and stared at it. It, too, was badly yellowed, but she could make out the figure of a stocky man with ginger hair and a slender, erect blond man with a barrel trunk, short legs, a fine chest and shoulders, and a large head. He wore a V-neck sweater over a button-down white shirt and was almost movie-star handsome. Between them stood a willowy girl almost as tall as them, with long, perfectly straight auburn hair and slender, pretty legs under a miniskirt. Both men had their arms around the girl, and she was smiling with unmistakable delight. Both men were squinting solemnly into the sun.
    She looked at it a long time and then turned to her aunt.
    “Why, this is you! Isn’t it? Just look at that skirt…and Lordy, this is Daddy ! And I guess this is Grandaddy Carter. Aunt Jenny, Daddy looks just exactly like he did then. And you look—really, really pretty…”
    Jenny Raiford came over into the light and took the photo