This Crooked Way by Elizabeth Spencer

Author:Elizabeth Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

2

I suppose my trouble in those long ago days was merely an excess of the Morgan complaint. I was romantic, like them; but I craved a hardier kind of romance than they seemed to offer. And maybe the thing that I cried out against that day when Louise and I spoke of children was not age, or loss of beauty, but the loss of that romance which had so long homed in me as to make dislodgment slow and painful. Yet, oddly, it was from my own children—the first two, at least—that I gained reprieve, for no mother ever looked on two more dashing offspring than Elinor and Winston.

They came of age in the Delta of the ’twenties, with plenty of money to spend and clever, rich, fagless people to run with. They nearly drove Amos out of his mind. It was useless, I felt, to dream of ruling them; one could only sit tight and hope for the best. I could wish for the slower pace of my own day, which had seemed breathless enough; but I could not help it if the new Delta infected them, with its speed and spaces.

Elinor loved horses, my sleek daughter—all black and white she was, black straight-pulled-back hair and black habit with the white stock. I see the pound of the narrow, shining legs and the fling of hooves out in the big ring with floodlights slipping down the night air, the band playing softly, and the loudspeaker calling gaits out to where the horseflesh heaved in a silken pack and the dirt flew; then out of the pack she comes, sturdy and skilled, in black and white, a small neat mast steady against the wind. Ah, she would be like me, she thought; but though I did not tell her, she was never like me, for she would dirty herself in the stables to care for them and the knowledge and skill she was at pains for to set herself apart were common things in my day and no more thought of than table manners. But times had changed; she loved inordinately the horses Amos could afford to give her, and when she rode, especially when she won, a beauty came over her that I did not see again after Amos sold the horses in Louisville, Kentucky, and she fled home alone riding day coaches in a dusty habit, the white stock staining, mile by mile, with soot. There floated in her wake during the succeeding weeks a dozen or so two and three dollar checks, cashed in out-of-the-way places by I do not know what method of young and purposeful despair.

Then Winston, so prodigal with time from birth that when Amos says he slept for sixteen years I can find no defense for him except to see him stretched out in the glider blonde and brown, one finger making little pushes against the wall, lashes thick and lowered against a face so careless, it seems to me as I recall

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