True Fires Read Online Free PDF

year Betty was born), Charmwood was one of several homes her family owned: four floors, twenty-four rooms, an acre of impossible-to-maintain plantings surrounded by a half-mile of ridiculously expensive ironwork fencing that had long since rusted into ruin in the Florida air. Back then, when Papa was in commodities in Pittsburgh, the house was open only eight weeks out of the year. Oh, the parties they’d had then, in the winters, when the other wealthy families were in town, the chances she’d had to make a better match than smiling Cash Whitworth. Why had she picked him, of all people? Let him sweet-talk her into staying here year ’round? Let him borrow all that money from Papa to canal the swampland, develop home sites on Lake Esther’s mosquito side? Oh, they’d had fun in the early days, before Clay was born. But when the bust came to Florida in 1926, Clay was no more than five, Cash lit out like a Canada goose, without so much as a squawk good-bye. Papa had been there for her then, to make everything okay. But, three years later, on Black Thursday ’29, her poor papa had died, having failed to survive a twelve-story “fall” from his office window, and Mama went out of her mind. When all was said and done, this rich-man’s folly of a house was all they had left of Daddy’s fortune.
Which was more than
most, so quit your complainin’!
    If only Clay was here . . . Well, he’s not, now, is he? They’re
all gone, now, aren’t they? Cash, Papa. Mama. Clay. It’s just you
and me, Charmwood. You with your leaky old roof and me with my
creaky old hip. And sixteen mouths to feed first thing in the morning.
    Betty Whitworth rolls over on her back. In the small room off the kitchen, the one once inhabited only eight weeks out of the year by her family’s cook, the only room in the house unadorned with extravagant wallpaper, carved oak cornices, or intricate, parquet wood flooring, Betty listens to the water rushing down the old rain gutter and wipes its wetness off her cheeks.
    The scouts return to confirm the whispered wisdom of the Old Ones. The days of warmth and
widely available food supplies are in decline.
The time the colony calls The Quickening is at
hand.
    Outside the rim, those who gather food follow
urgent orders. They move faster, go farther, and
feed themselves extra in order to carry larger
loads on the longer journeys home.
    Inside the walls, the guards commence their
careful checking and chinking against the coming chill. Those assigned to store and stockpile
prepare their reply to The Quickening’s central
question, “Will there be enough?”
    Within her chambers, She Who Decides
awaits their report. All others (except the children, of course) prepare to stay or go upon Her
command.
    Does She, in Her wisdom, also await the potential intervention of He Who Provides? No
one knows. Nor will they ask. Nor will they
suggest or protest, so long as the children, their
treasures, are safe.

9
    “May! Got any Bufferin in your file drawer?”
    Principal Ed Cantrell sits, elbows on his desk, bald head in his hands, feeling the warning signs of a really bad one coming on, spiderlike, across the whole right side of his face. If he doesn’t get some relief quick, he knows, it’ll wrap his entire skull in a web of pain, and he’ll have to lie down on the little cot in the nurse’s closet usually reserved for sick kids and humiliated, menstruating sixth-grade girls in need of their mothers.
    “May!” he yells.
    “Here.” Miss May White appears in front of him with two Bufferin and a white cone-shaped paper cup of water. As he grabs them, he sees with a groan the stack of message slips she’s slapped on his desk.
    “How many now?”
    “Seven so far.” She purses her thin lips.
    “Plus twelve at the house last night.” Cantrell jerks his chin to help the Bufferin and the water slide down his throat, then crumples the cup and hurls it into his trash can. “Goddamn K. A. DeLuth!”
    “Born