Read Online Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Romance, Contemporary, Family Life, Domestic Fiction, Love Stories, Georgia, Family secrets, Marriage, Betrayal, north carolina, Camps
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right,” my father said, not looking over his shoulder. I could hear the laughter in his voice, though.
“But you can’t have cow dookie in the house, can you?”
I pattered down the steps and into high June on the river, buzzing with faraway insects and trilling with birdsong and smelling
of wild honeysuckle from the river woods and cultivated blossoms from our garden, and fresh-mowngreen grass. I twirled around three times on my bare feet and toppled over into the cool, damp grass, head back, face tipped
up to the sun, eyes closed under its gentle fist. It seemed to me at that moment that every atom in my body stretched itself
up toward the sun, that my blood sang with the air and the running river, and that I would forever be as happy as I was at
that moment.
“What you don’t know ain’t gon’ to hurt you,” Nellie always said.
I would have occasion to remember that later, many times.
But for that brief, indelible interval between babyhood and first grade it was absolutely enough for me to be what my father
called a mini-comet, blazing around the house and garden trailing fire from my head.
From the beginning it was actually painful for me to be still for very long, and my mother gave up chasing after me and dragging
me out of trees or off the small muddy cliffs down to the river and hired a young black girl—Lavonda, Nellie’s niece—for the
position of Thayer keeper. Lavonda was perpetually smiling and sweet tempered, adept at her given task, had the IQ of a ten-year-old
and the sleek, chocolate voluptuousness of a Harlem dancer. I absolutely adored her, and, I think, she me, because our minds
ran along the same vivid, flowery fairy-tale track. I loved her stories of the terrible duppies who would drop down on you
out of the trees at night, and the ha’nts that could only be kept at bay by painting your front door blue, and the various
wonderful things you could make out of graveyard dirt. She listened, enthralled, to my lisped accounts of the Greek and Norsemyths that I so loved, which my father often read to me. My mother thought they were not fit reading for a child, but he said,
“Nonsense; they’ll give her all the magic she needs.”
“Why does she need magic? She’s got to live in the real world just like the rest of us.”
“That’s why she needs magic. Some people need it more than others. The real world is not going to be enough for Thayer.”
He had continued to read me the shining, shifting, bloody myths, and I continued to tell them to Lavonda. On the whole she
got the best of the deal. She taught her smaller siblings never to be afraid when it thundered; it was only Old Thor banging
around Asgard with his hammer. On the other hand, when I painted our front door blue (as far as I could reach) it wasn’t comfort
and accolades that I got. My well-deserved reputation as a troublesome child was born early.
I never thought my beautiful mother disliked me. Not then and even now, not really. I know now that what she felt for me was
kind of a despairing puzzlement. There was not a thread in my entire fabric that seemed to come from her, or any other woman
she knew.
My sister, Lily, was Mother in miniature, and there was a deep understanding between them even when Lily was behaving her
worst. Lily’s small sins were smearing herself with my mother’s makeup, ruining her pretty satin shoes clomping up and down
the stairs in them, giggling and flirting at school chapel services, throwing tantrums because she was not allowed to wear
her pretty Easter outfit to school. Things that my mother might deplore but understood in herdeepest heart. Lily was a wellborn and beautiful little girl. Mother had been one of those things herself, at least relatively.
She only had to look over her own territory to find the words that would best chasten Lily.
“Take those off. Nobody likes a little girl who makes herself gaudy and cheap. You won’t have a beau to
“But you can’t have cow dookie in the house, can you?”
I pattered down the steps and into high June on the river, buzzing with faraway insects and trilling with birdsong and smelling
of wild honeysuckle from the river woods and cultivated blossoms from our garden, and fresh-mowngreen grass. I twirled around three times on my bare feet and toppled over into the cool, damp grass, head back, face tipped
up to the sun, eyes closed under its gentle fist. It seemed to me at that moment that every atom in my body stretched itself
up toward the sun, that my blood sang with the air and the running river, and that I would forever be as happy as I was at
that moment.
“What you don’t know ain’t gon’ to hurt you,” Nellie always said.
I would have occasion to remember that later, many times.
But for that brief, indelible interval between babyhood and first grade it was absolutely enough for me to be what my father
called a mini-comet, blazing around the house and garden trailing fire from my head.
From the beginning it was actually painful for me to be still for very long, and my mother gave up chasing after me and dragging
me out of trees or off the small muddy cliffs down to the river and hired a young black girl—Lavonda, Nellie’s niece—for the
position of Thayer keeper. Lavonda was perpetually smiling and sweet tempered, adept at her given task, had the IQ of a ten-year-old
and the sleek, chocolate voluptuousness of a Harlem dancer. I absolutely adored her, and, I think, she me, because our minds
ran along the same vivid, flowery fairy-tale track. I loved her stories of the terrible duppies who would drop down on you
out of the trees at night, and the ha’nts that could only be kept at bay by painting your front door blue, and the various
wonderful things you could make out of graveyard dirt. She listened, enthralled, to my lisped accounts of the Greek and Norsemyths that I so loved, which my father often read to me. My mother thought they were not fit reading for a child, but he said,
“Nonsense; they’ll give her all the magic she needs.”
“Why does she need magic? She’s got to live in the real world just like the rest of us.”
“That’s why she needs magic. Some people need it more than others. The real world is not going to be enough for Thayer.”
He had continued to read me the shining, shifting, bloody myths, and I continued to tell them to Lavonda. On the whole she
got the best of the deal. She taught her smaller siblings never to be afraid when it thundered; it was only Old Thor banging
around Asgard with his hammer. On the other hand, when I painted our front door blue (as far as I could reach) it wasn’t comfort
and accolades that I got. My well-deserved reputation as a troublesome child was born early.
I never thought my beautiful mother disliked me. Not then and even now, not really. I know now that what she felt for me was
kind of a despairing puzzlement. There was not a thread in my entire fabric that seemed to come from her, or any other woman
she knew.
My sister, Lily, was Mother in miniature, and there was a deep understanding between them even when Lily was behaving her
worst. Lily’s small sins were smearing herself with my mother’s makeup, ruining her pretty satin shoes clomping up and down
the stairs in them, giggling and flirting at school chapel services, throwing tantrums because she was not allowed to wear
her pretty Easter outfit to school. Things that my mother might deplore but understood in herdeepest heart. Lily was a wellborn and beautiful little girl. Mother had been one of those things herself, at least relatively.
She only had to look over her own territory to find the words that would best chasten Lily.
“Take those off. Nobody likes a little girl who makes herself gaudy and cheap. You won’t have a beau to
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