Read Online Homeplace by Anne Rivers Siddons - Free Book Online Page A

light in his study. He would answer no knocks and calls from outside, and he would not open his door. In the end, it was Priss Comfort who went to Atlanta and bailed Mike and a bewildered J.W. out of jail and brought them home at dusk on that following day. Priss, who had been drinking steadily, was very nearly incoherent when she turned her car into the Winship driveway, but she parked it neatly. Even when she was drunk, Priss could always drive.
    What she could not do was talk. And so she slumped into the wing chair that had been Claudia’s and dropped her head into her hands, and said no word in Mike’s defense when John Winship came into his twilit living room in the company of a red-eyed DeeDee andan ashen, drowned-looking Bayard Sewell, and looked at his youngest daughter and the drooping black boy behind her.
    “I don’t blame you, J.W.,” he said finally to the terrified boy. “You’re stupid, but you’re not sorry. I know who made you go up there. But you, Micah … well. I guess we could start with whore, couldn’t we? And after that we could add criminal, and race-mixer, and mother-killer …”
    The words coiled out of him, snake-cold, thick, murderous, eighteen years of unspat phlegm.
    “Daddy …” Mike whispered. She put out her hand and then dropped it onto the back of Priss’s chair to steady herself. She thought that she would faint. There was a roaring in her ears, and her vision blurred whitely.
    “I curse the day I earned that title,” the terrible stranger’s voice went on. “And I refuse to wear it any longer. You are not my daughter. I have only one daughter. The other one killed her mother and my wife, and then she died herself, in a jail full of nigger criminals.”
    A grotesque sort of snort, a gibbous snicker, came from J.W., and Mike saw with foolish incomprehension that he was crying. Opaque silver tears made snail’s tracks down his black cheeks.
    “I’m glad your mother is dead, J.W.,” John Winship said in the frozen snake’s voice. “Otherwise this day would have killed her for sure. Go on home now. As I said, no one can really blame you.”
    J.W. fled, snuffling. DeeDee burst into loud wails. John Winship and Bayard Sewell were silent.
    Mike turned to the dark-haired boy, standing in the gloom of the unlighted living room. His face shone white. From outside, the scent of the wisteria along the side porch, in full summer flood, perfumed the air as if it were not alive with pain and awfulness.
    “Bay,” Mike whispered. “Help me. Tell him. I did the right thing; I tried … I wanted … tell him. And then let’s go. Let’s leave now.”
    She held out her hand. It felt impossibly heavy and tremulous, as if balanced on the end of a thin wire yards long.
    Bayard Sewell’s face was a blanched mask in the dusk. He did not take her hand. He moved, one blind step, backwards and closer to John Winship. They stood together then, boy and man. He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth.
    “I can’t, Mike,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
    She could scarcely hear him for the roaring in her ears. After a long moment that beat in the air like the concussion of thunder, she said mildly, “Well, that’s all right, then.”
    She walked past the two of them, standing there on Claudia’s cherished Bokhara rug. Past Priss Comfort, slumped in the wing chair, staring straight ahead of her. Upstairs to her room, and closed the door behind her. She did not lock it.
    The next morning, before five, she took one suitcase full of clothes and the thousand dollars in the duck bank and caught the first morning bus to Atlanta. There were few people on it: workers on the early shift at the Ford assembly plant in Hapeville and one or two black women in maids’ uniforms; no one she knew. She got a room at a Methodist Church home for bachelor girls near the art museum that she had seen before, and went the same day to register for her fall classes at the Atlanta Division of the