Read Online Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons - Free Book Online

students banged in and out of the house regularly, despite stern warnings from their teachers. The boys adored my father,
     and he them, and most of them thought the big house where their president lived was part of the school.
    This drove my mother wild. One of my first memories is of sitting at the supper table while Nellie, our family’s long-suffering
     and indispensable maid, led a fourth grader back to campus after he had come shouting in to show my father a badly squashed
     toad he had found in the driveway.
    “When are those little monsters going to learn that it’s
our
house?” she cried. “It’s not the McClaren house, like everybody in Lytton calls it, and it’s not the Hamilton House or the
     President’s Residence, not to mention the Prez, like that entire blasted school calls it. It’s the Wentworth house. Can’t
     you get that through anybody’s thick head over there?”
    “Probably not, by now,” my father said mildly, smiling at her. “What difference does it make? We know whose it is. And in
     a way, it is part of the school. I sort of like that they feel that way about it.”
    He excused himself to go and wash the mortal remains of the toad from his hands. I looked up at my mother. I was still in
     the bunny-painted high chair that had been Lily’s, but itcould scarcely contain me. The next step would be a regular chair with a pile of books on it.
    “Is this really our house?” I said.
    “Thayer Wentworth,” my mother snapped. “Of course it’s our house. Why on earth would you think it isn’t?”
    I thought perhaps I was edging close to the boundary between my mother’s soft side and that other side, where every hard-edged
     thing from annoyance to displeasure and far beyond that dwelled. I always knew I had bumped the boundary when she called me
     by my whole name.
    “That boy said it was the school’s,” I said.
    “What boy?” Her voice was growing crisper, and I began to plot my escape route. Out of the chair, hang a quick right through
     the kitchen, out the back porch and down the stairs, and deep into the half acre of manicured greenery that was our back lawn
     as it ran down to the river.
    “That boy that comes to see Lily,” I said.
    My mother gave Lily, who at twelve was a pastel sketch of what my mother had become as an adult, a complacent look. She was
     lovely as a fledgling and, as Nellie frequently muttered, “as spoiled as sour milk.” This day Lily only lowered her eyelashes,
     not speaking. Mother knew which boy I meant. He was mouthy and slick and his parents ran a dairy farm. He was dead meat in
     this house, even if he did not know it yet.
    “That boy doesn’t know what he is talking about, as usual,” Mother said.
    “Well, I thought we lived in it because we all went to the school,” I said.
    “Nobody in this house goes to that school but yourfather, and that’s because he’s the president. And besides, we run that school, not the other way around. Girls can’t go to
     it anyway. It’s just for boys….”
    “Lots and lots of boys,” Lily murmured, a small smile calling out the lone enchanted dimple in her left cheek. I had it, too,
     but to me it only looked as if someone had poked a pencil in my cheek.
    “
Lily
…,” my mother began.
    I made my escape. I had reached the back porch before I heard my mother calling after me. I put on speed and bumped into my
     father, who was ambling toward the kitchen drying his hands on a towel.
    “Oops! Where’re you going, pocket rocket?” He smiled at me.
    “Mama’s gone over on the other side,” I said.
    “Is she mad at you?” he said, still smiling but not as broadly.
    “I don’t know. Either me or Lily or Lily’s boyfriend. The one she always says has cow dookie on his shoes…”
    “Oh, that one,” my father said, and sighed. “Well go on and make your exit. I’ll talk to her. She may be right about Lily’s
     swain, at that.”
    “Don’t you like him?”
    “Oh, I like him all