Shade of the Raintree, Centennial Edition by Larry Lockridge

Author:Larry Lockridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

In early July, 1945, at an intersection on Highway One, my family and I gathered up bags and typewriters, climbed off the bus, and walked half a mile to an eighteenth-century country house rented for the summer. The Cleaves Barn was no longer available but South Byfield, Massachusetts, four miles from the sea, was an ideal writer’s sanctuary. Situated close to the Governor Dummer Academy for Boys, the two-story New England house had a fireplace in every room, beamed ceilings, wide plank floors, and shutters. My mother felt for the first time that she’d like to have a house of her own. There were enough rooms for my father to take cover from hubbub.

A pasture next door featured a woebegone, cross-eyed cow, and there were blueberry patches, some black snakes, and an invasion of elm tree beetles to rival the sandfleas at the Smalleys’ back in 1941. But the dignified landlady, Mrs. Helen Noyes, said, “The elm tree beetle, of which we seem to have a few this year, is not a dirty bug, if you know what I mean, Mr. Lockridge. After all, he eats elm trees.”

“My secret conviction,” thought my father, “is that the little bastard feeds exclusively on dung and corpses.”

My mother was once again pregnant, expecting in February, and this time the race was to finish the novel before the arrival of the stork. Knowing virtually nobody in the neighborhood and as usual having no telephone, they found it a good quiet place for work. “Everything out here is so goddamn peaceful and wholesome that I’m going nuts,” he wrote Steve Tryon. Once a week Mrs. Noyes drove him or my mother into nearby Newburyport for groceries.

During the war only the locals were normally favored with meat. Then one day out of the blue my mother’s brother Leon and his young son David dropped in. My mother wept. She hadn’t recognized till then how much she’d missed her family the past three years. Her husband, deciding the occasion called for steak, talked the Newburyport butcher into relinquishing the only meat we had that summer—a piece so tough we might as well have been eating that ancient cross-eyed cow.

The Lockridges on High Street were similarly bereft of family. Elsie wrote Vernice that “we all want to see the children & you and Ross so much. One Sunday morn Dad came out into the kitchen where Lillian & I were working & asked to see Jeanne Marie’s picture. I couldn’t leave my work then so Lillian said she would get it. I told her where it was on my desk. For some reason she failed to find it & Dad apparently had to see it instanter. So I went to my desk & soon located it. Dad looked at all three, wished he could see, actually see, Larry so he could see what he looked like & how he acts, said he would love to tell Ernest his history stories. Then he again went into raptures about Jeanne Marie.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.