"Alan F. Troop - Dragon Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Troop Alan F)

BMCтАФ Jimmy Stinson, Bob Hollander, Rick Rosenbaum, Mike Fisher, Geoff Weisbaum and Dan
PalmerтАФfor your relentless teasing. To my mother, who's probably purchased more copies of my first
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book than anyone else. And to Delaney, Zoe and Aaron, who won't be allowed to read this book until
they're much, much older.




1

It's been almost four years since my wife, Elizabeth, died. No headstone marks her grave. No bouquet
of cut flowers lies on the grass that grows above her. I see little value in such things. I know perfectly well
whose dead body I lowered into the ground. I need no letters carved in stone to remind me to mourn my
poor bride's passage. I need no dead vegetation to honor her memory.

BecauseElizabethloved the garden just below our veranda, overlooking our island's small harbor, I
buried her next to it. Because she often sat and relaxed under the shade of the ancient gumbo limbo trees
that dot my island, I took a cutting from the largest of the trees and planted it at the head of her grave.

That skinny twig's rapid growth has made me shake my head. Now over twenty feet tall, the tree stands
guard over Elizabeth's resting place, breaking the force of the fierce winds that sometimes blow in from
the sea, shielding the grave from the driving rain, shading it from the burning sun.

Like all of its kind, the gumbo limbo possesses a thick glossy green-brown trunk that weeps strands of
red bark, as if it's in permanent mourning. Its gnarled branches spread out and up in asymmetrical
disarray, hugging theair, connectingElizabeth's resting place tothe sky above.

I like to believe thatElizabethwould smile if she could know such a mighty tree grows above her. It
would please her too, I think, to see how much her son has grown.




"Papa?" Henri says, just after breakfast, as soon as we arrive at the grave, "Did Mama ever see me?"

"No. She died just after you were born," I say, stifling a sigh. I dislike telling my son partial truths but I
know better than to discuss something so complex with a young child. One day, I promise myself, when
Henri's older, I'll tell him the full story of his mother's death.

For now I look at my son and ruffle his hair with my hand. Almost four, the boy's as large as most
five-year-olds, far more precocious, already beginning to show the tendency toward muscularity, the
wide shoulders that are typical of our people.

Not surprisingly, he's chosen to look like me, sporting the same middle-American appearance, the same
blond hair, even the same cleft chin as I do. Had Elizabeth lived, I've no doubt he'd look much like her