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

your name if you don’t
     stop that. I don’t want to be ashamed of my pretty daughter.”
    But that would not have worked with me, and Mother knew it even if she did not know what would.
    “Do you want everybody to think you’re a wild thing with nobody to bring you up right?” she said once, when I had stripped
     down to my underpants and smeared my chest with red mud and was creeping through the boxwood maze dragging my father’s kindling
     hatchet after a sniggering Lavonda.
    “Who are you supposed to be now?”
    “I’m Smee. He scalped people in
Peter Pan.
He didn’t cut off your whole head, though, just your hair. I don’t think that sounds so bad, but the way Lavonda’s carrying
     on…”
    My mother launched a long, level look at the capering Lavonda and Lavonda straightened herself into seemly erectness and stood
     there, a veritable statue of biddability, her enormous breasts straining at the old Atlanta Braves tee shirt she wore.
    “Take her inside and wash that mud off of her, Lavonda, and put Mr. Wentworth’s hatchet back where it’s supposed to be. And
     go in through the basement. I don’t want anybody from the school to see you.”
    “Yes’m,” Lavonda said sweetly, and my mother turnedand swept back into the house, trailing a cloud of Casaque behind her. She had come a long way since the days of My Sin.
    “She sho’ smells good,” Lavonda said.
    “It comes out of a bottle,” I said.
    “Well, I know that. I just wish I had a bottle of that.”
    “I’ll get you one. I know just which one it is. She’s got more than one of them. You just better not let on where it came
     from.”
    “You think I’m dumb?” Lavonda sniffed. “I ain’t gon’ wear it here. I’m gon’ wear it to ‘vival tonight. J. W. Fishburne’s mama
     makes him come every night, and I’m gon’ sit right behind him and fan my perfume at him. He’ll notice me then, I betcha.”
    It occurred to me, even in my half-naked red mud days, that if J. W. Fishburne hadn’t noticed her bazonkers by now he must
     be blind, but I said nothing. Bathed and dressed again, I ran into my mother’s bedroom and swiped a half-full bottle of Casaque
     and gave it to Lavonda, and she swished home that afternoon with a heart full of hope and roughly a half a year’s salary in
     her cotton tote bag.
    “I don’t know where that child gets it,” I overheard my mother say to my father that night. The heating register in my upstairs
     bedroom was directly above the one in the downstairs sitting room, and through it, for most of my childhood, I heard all manner
     of things that I don’t suppose would have ever been said to me.
    “Certainly not from me or my mother, and she’s absolutely nothing like Lily. If you had a sister, maybe…”
    “I have Mother,” my father said, “and from what I know of her when she was little, I know exactly where she gets it.”
    “I simply can’t imagine Caroline ever—”
    “Taking off her clothes in the backyard? Chasing people with a hatchet? You’d be surprised.”
    “I would indeed,” sniffed my mother, and that was the end of the affair.
    But still, I got my share of hugs and sweet-smelling cheek kisses, and she always read me a story and tucked me into bed at
     night. The stories ran more to “Jack and Jill” than
Peter Pan
, but I could count on my father for literary excitement. I loved it when my mother read to me, loved it all: the one lit
     lamp and the shadows leaping up the walls, the silky hush of the bedclothes when she drew them closer up under my chin, the
     rising and falling lullaby of her voice. My mother always had a beautiful voice. Lily has it, too.
    When I started first grade, in the little Lytton elementary school my mother had gone to, and her mother before her, my mother
     had become the legendary hostess she seemed born to be and we had parties large and small at our house almost weekly. Many
     were for the school: alumni and trustees and faculty and very