The Eden Tree Read Online Free PDF

sailing out onto the dirt road in a cloud of dust. Linn sat up and craned her neck at her surroundings. This was her first sunlit view of her father’s birthplace.
    Farmland stretched in all directions. Sheep and cows and horses grazed in pastures the color of bottle glass and the rich texture of finest velvet. The sky above was an azure vault dotted with wisps of cotton clouds. Clay honked his horn as they passed a donkey cart on the road and the man leading the animal doffed his cap. Linn was charmed. It was a picture out of another age. The space age had made few inroads here. “Back of Godspeed,” they called it, and so it was.
    “It’s all so beautiful,” she murmured, and then stopped when she realized she had spoken aloud.
    Clay shot her a measuring glance. “Isn’t your country beautiful as well?” he asked innocently.
    He was baiting her. “Of course it is,” Linn answered sweetly. “From Malibu to coastal Maine, from the plains of Montana to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s all beautiful.”
    “Every bit of it?”
    “In different ways. ‘From sea to shining sea,’” Linn responded with satisfaction.
    To her utter surprise Clay burst out laughing. It was a delightfully masculine sound, reverberating in the car. His white teeth flashed as he said, “What an American you are. ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.’ Do they still say that in the States?”
    “They do, when the occasion warrants it.”
    “And is this such an occasion?” He was smiling. He had a dimple in his left cheek.
    “I think it is.” She sensed that he enjoyed this verbal jousting and that was fine with Linn. She was good at it.
    His eyes danced mischievously. “A curious thing I’ve noticed about Americans. All they do is criticize one another, on the telly and in the press, carrying on about this senator or that program, what’s wrong with everything and what should be done about it. But the minute somebody else dares to say an unkind word they turn on him with fangs bared. Now don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Neither do I. I think it’s wonderful. I’ve always had a great admiration for that spirit. We could use some of it in this country. We’re divided here and it will be the ruin of us.”
    Linn stared at him; this attitude was as unexpected as his laughter.
    “I read something once,” Con said, “about Baron von Steuben. He was working with the Americans at the time of your Revolutionary War. He said that he could tell one of his soldiers, ‘Do this,’ and he would do it, but to an American he had to say, ‘This is why you should do this,’ and then he would do it. I love that story. It’s the key to your national state of mind.”
    “You seem to know a lot about that,” Linn commented. “Were you ever in America?”
    “I was,” he replied, looking straight ahead at the road again. “I spent a year as an exchange student, from Trinity College in Dublin to Fordham.”
    His tone was flat, uninviting, and Linn got the impression she shouldn’t pursue it further.
    They arrived in downtown Ballykinnon, which consisted of a single main street with a church at one end and a war memorial at the other. In between were various shops and several public houses, or “pubs,” the largest of which was the Kinnon Arms. Clay skirted the World War I monument, turning toward the church. Linn looked back over her shoulder at the two men who sat on the base of the stone structure, sunning themselves.
    “The town layabouts,” Clay advised her, seeing the direction of her glance. “Both of them together not worth the powder to blow them up. The one on the right is Johnno Keegan. He was injured in an accident about twenty years ago and has been living off it ever since. If you should be so crass as to suggest that he might get a job, he has a sudden attack of limping and stumbling fit to wring tears from a stone. A sharp article he is, too; you’d best watch out for him. He’d skin a