The Old Man’s Place by John Sanford

Author:John Sanford [Sanford, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brash Books
Published: 2021-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Near Tuckerton, New Jersey, a narrow dirt road left the Atlantic City pike and bent east toward the ocean through the pines that cluttered the sand dunes. The road ran down to a point that sprouted like a nipple from the mainland between Great Bay and Little Egg Bay, and crossing a lattice of sandbars, it came to an end on the beach of the inlet.

Not far from the head of the point, there was an old truck farm that used to belong to a man named John Wayne, but he’d been dead for some time and the only one who lived in the little unpainted house was his daughter Anna, a girl not yet nineteen years old. She wasn’t pretty, but when people took the trouble to give her more than a glance, they found out after a while that they’d forgottten all about prettiness. Her face and throat and arms were browned as dark as maplewood, browned almost to the color of her hair, which she wore long, a little below her shoulders, and tied close to the back of her neck with a piece of ribbon. Her eyes were brown, too, solid brown, like pennies, and they weren’t much smaller than pennies.

She’d lived on her father’s farm all her life, and although the place was halfway between New York and Philadelphia, she’d never been to either. Only twice had she taken a trip to Atlantic City, which wasn’t much more than thirty miles from her home. She’d gone to grade school up near the main road until her mother died, and then she’d left and never gone back. From the time she was twelve, she’d been cooking meals for her father, washing and mending his clothes, making all of her own from the oldfashioned rags that her mother had left, and in addition doing the work around the farm that was light enough for her to handle.

Whenever her father had given her an afternoon off, she’d spent the time on the ocean beach at the far side of the shoal that formed the inlet. This beach was near the southern tip of a twentymile sandbar. Nobody lived within five miles of it, and except for a few fishermen during the summer months, hardly anybody ever went there. Anna used to put on her bathingsuit at the farm, wrap a towel and something to eat in a square of rubber cut from an old raincoat, strap the package to her waist, and then swim over to the sandbar, a distance of about a quarter of a mile at low tide.

Nobody had ever gone with her, and she’d never wanted company. She liked best of all to sit alone on the beach, facing the ocean and watching the waves curve over and smash themselves to pieces before rushing up across the sand to spread a scalloped fringe of foam at her feet. Looking at the water and listening to its steaming wash as it churned over the pebbles

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