Homeplace by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons [Siddons, Anne Rivers]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance, Fiction, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780061011412
Google: 2NEWedIHBJMC
Amazon: 006101141X
Publisher: HarperTorch
Published: 1988-01-01T18:30:00+00:00

Sam brought her father back an hour later, just as the thunderstorm that had been growling and muttering in the west broke over Lytton. The air inside the house went suddenly dark and strange, and the wind blew silver sheets of rain past the windows and against the front and side porches. The smell of warm, soaking earth mingled with the acrid, hellfire smell of ozone as a bolt shot home somewhere near, and Mike flew, barefoot and exhilarated, out into the wisteria bower to bring in the cushions. She had just unbound her hair and was toweling it dry when they burst into the kitchen from the garage.

“Come in before you drown,” she said, holding the door while her father wheeled himself up the ramp into the room. He was not wet, but Sam Canaday, following with a disreputable dripping umbrella, was streaked and spotted with rain.

“Like a cow pissing on a flat rock,” John Winship said. “Do the homeplace good. Lawns and scuppernong vines were looking pretty bad.”

His face was startlingly white in the dark room, paler than Mike had ever seen it, and there was a yellow pinch to his mouth that spoke of pain and the effort to control it, and the death that was spinning toward him like a star. But there were hectic splotches of color on his sunken cheeks, and his eyes had a knife-edge glitter. He carried his narrow death’s head high on the thin stalk of a neck, and a feverish ebullience shimmered in the air around him like an aura. From one of Priss’s long-ago English classes the image of Death as a reveler at a masquerade ball snapped into Mike’s mind. She recognized it: Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” To waltz with her father at this moment, in his strange excitement, would be to dance with death. She shivered and flicked on the overhead light, and the room sprang into fluorescent whiteness, livid against the storm outside.

“Did you have a good trip?” Mike said. “What did the doctor say?”

“Said just what I thought he’d say, the old fool,” John Winship said, and his voice was stronger than she had heard it for weeks. “Said that little twinge last night was more likely gas and I’m not a bit worse than I was a month ago. Not much better, but no worse, either. Waste of time. Told Sam so. But I finally got to see what needs doing down at the homeplace, and I’m gon’ get J.W. right on that, and I got to thinking: ‘stead of lying around looking at the goddamn TV every morning and evening, I think I’m gon’ start me a letter-writing campaign. Bury every newspaper and TV and radio station in a hundred-mile radius so deep in paper that they’ll have to pay attention eventually. Tell ‘em how it feels to have a bunch of government sons of bitches just come and take your property, show ‘em what a real Southerner does when

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