The Golden Touch by Laura London

Author:Laura London [London, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forever Yours
Published: 1981-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

Kathy jumped out of the car, scarcely realizing that the door handle came off in her hand as she closed the door. The mossy ground gave like a carpet beneath her feet as she walked toward the cabin, falling in love all over again with Colonial America. “Neil, what a wonderful house! What did you do, evict Abe Lincoln?”

“In these parts, it would have been Davy Crockett,” he said, politely removing the door handle from her hand and tossing it onto the front seat of the car.

“Davy Crockett? Really?”

“No. Not really. As far as I know, he never came near the place,” Neil said, his voice muffled as he put his head in to the trunk to get her luggage. “This land was owned by six generations of a family that ran a sawmill nearby. This place had been abandoned for thirty years before I bought the land, but they left a nice feeling behind. Go ahead in; the door’s open.”

She stepped inside. A large fireplace with its soft ochre stonework dominated a beam-ceilinged room laid with bright rag rugs and a cherry table of country Hepplewhite. Open pink shelves drooped their scalloped edges along a wall and Kathy smiled over the canisters of whole wheat flour and hominy grits, copper cooking vessels, intriguingly covered baskets and colorful kitchenware. Beneath was a very old oak icebox with a glass-paneled candle lantern on it. On the opposite wall, an Audubon print of a meadow mouse adorned the space between chintz-hung windows.

“And you call me an old-fashioned girl,” she said finally. “There’s no electricity?”

“Not a watt,” he said.

“And the hot and cold running water…?”

He went to the copper sink and pulled on the handle of the pump three times—squeak, squeak, squeak—and a clear stream splashed out. He smiled and shrugged. “And I’ll bet you thought I was a pampered pop hero who couldn’t do anything for himself.”

She hadn’t expected any of it—the beautiful little cabin, the old clunker of a car that he loved. It touched her. And his smile touched her also, half-derisive, more magical than vulnerable, the smile of a person in contact with his own failings and strengths, reaching out to her like a warm handclasp. Across the room, she could feel the unspoken communication. He couldn’t have known it was her lifelong desire to spend a night in a log cabin, yet here it was, in an almost eerie dreamwish fulfillment. Every year she had blown out the ever increasing set of candles to that wish, never telling. It had worked!

Under a spell of heavenly charm, she wandered through an open doorway into the second room where steeply pitched roof beams hung over a rope bed of curly maple laid with a bright quilt in a rising star pattern that reminded her of her own quilt at home.

Her eyes strayed to the graceful form of Neil’s old guitar, leaning against a beautiful Shaker cupboard. She studied the guitar. Yes. It was the one she had fixed for him last spring.

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