The Legacy of Beulah Land by Lonnie Coleman

Author:Lonnie Coleman [Coleman, Lonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Classica Libris
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

6

It was customary to pay extra attention to those recently bereaved and to make them little gifts, at the same time respecting their grief and pointing a hope for the future. After his wife’s death, James received from thoughtful spinsters and widows many a cake and custard, enjoying them when they were worthy but reflecting little on the dreams that had been baked into them. He did not bother to respond when Annabel, critically nibbling a pinch of crust from such a gift, observed, “I don’t imagine you will care to marry again, having tried it twice.” Whatever his private thoughts, he had never confided them to his sister, and he was not about to do so now.

James was comfortable in the house he had acquired along with his second wife. Old Tenah, whose cabin was at the bottom of the kitchen garden, continued to cook and clean for him, while her simple nephew Enoch possessed wits enough to guide him about the town. He required no guide at the sawmill, familiarity as well as smell and sound telling him where he was and guarding him from dangerous work at hand. If during his hours at home he was lonely and sometimes deviled by lust, still he managed; and he had begun to wonder if Frankie Saxon considered him very old. He was fifty-three to her thirty-two, not such a difference as there would have appeared had she been nineteen to his forty. He remembered, of course, that she had once been courted by Benjamin, but that was long ago, and they had both married others. Advantage was on his side: she was poor and loved ease and had two children to provide for.

He had never seen her, but he knew she was beautiful, and not merely from having been told so. Her scent was to him the womanliest fragrance; her hands were shapely and supple to his touch; her voice, of the middle register and nothing out of the ordinary, had come to sound unique to his ears, no matter what others might be speaking in a room. On a recent stop at the barber’s, James had asked that particular care be taken with the trimming of his hair and beard and wanted to know exactly how gray he was. He was told, “Hardly at all; a man of thirty would be proud to look so fine.” James could not see the mockery in the eyes of the barber when he gave the answer he knew was wanted, and cheered himself by supposing that, although a friend or relative might flatter to console, this man of scissors had nothing to gain or lose by telling the plain truth.

Of those who had taken special notice of him since he became a widower was Sarah Troy. Herself a widow, she had no design other than to comfort an old friend and onetime neighbor. Indeed, James’s father had proposed marriage to her long after James himself had made her daughter Rachel his first wife.

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.