The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks [Banks, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

REEL #9

Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s only a meaningless coincidence, that I reached the end of that reel just as I was telling about the first time Sadie and I kissed and declared our love for each other. In any case, swapping out a filled reel of tape for a fresh blank one gave me a chance to get up from my chair and leave the porch and walk through the house and clear my mind of its turbulence, which I needed nearly as much when telling about that first kiss and declaration of love as I did when it actually happened, some sixty-four years ago.

I was a seventeen-year-old boy in love with a twenty-four-year-old woman who, while not yet a full member of a society sworn to celibacy, was a novitiate and a ward of that society. I was a resident novitiate in the same society myself, a secret nonbeliever, and was expected to ask for full membership as soon as I turned eighteen. For all I knew at the time, this woman, whom I loved above all others and whom I would continue to love for the rest of my life, was dying of tuberculosis. She might recover, of course. But when Sadie first came over from Sunshine Home to live at New Bethany, Eldress Mary had let it slip that the Sunshine Home doctor had given her barely six months at most. That was over a year ago, however, and she seemed now only a little worse than when she first arrived.

I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. Though she had not yet told me much about her past, especially regarding her romantic life, I knew that at least one man had attempted to seduce her. She had not lived in as cosseted and affluent and patrician a manner as I had imagined, and well into her adulthood she had been living unprotected in the World, so very likely there had been others who had tried to seduce her, for she was a young woman and beautiful and passionate. For all I knew, there may have been someone who had succeeded in seducing her. Possibly the doctor in Warwick, despite her claim to have rebuffed him. Or more than one. And what about Elder John? I could not count him out, regardless of her description of him as the father she never had. All these thoughts and fancies and fears went roaring through my head that night sixty-four years ago, as we embraced and kissed again and again on the rock down by the Hillsborough River, when Sadie abruptly pulled away from me and looked over my shoulder to the knoll above, and when I turned and followed her gaze, I saw the silhouette of Elder John, hands on hips, staring down at us.

He stood a hundred feet away and uphill and in semidarkness. I didn’t know how long he had been watching us or what he had actually seen, but by the time we

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.