"Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

noise level would rise until adult intervention was demanded. Uncle Ron would clump up the stairs
heavily and there would be a scurrying, with suppressed giggles and muffled screams, until
everyone found a bed again, so that by the time he turned on the hall light that illuminated the
attic dimly, all the children would seem to be sleeping. He would pause briefly in the doorway,
then close the door, turn off the light, and tramp back down the stairs, apparently deaf to the
renewed merriment behind him.
Whenever Aunt Claudia came up, it was like an apparition. One minute pillows would be
flying, someone would be crying, someone else trying to read by flashlight, several of the boys
playing cards by another flashlight, some of the girls huddled together whispering what had to be
delicious secrets, judging by the way they blushed and looked desperate if an adult came upon them
suddenly, and then the door would snap open, the light would fall on the disorder, and she would
be standing there. Aunt Claudia was very tall and thin, her nose was too big, and she was tanned
to a permanent old-leather color. She would stand there, immobile and terrible, and the children
would creep back into bed without a sound. She would not move until everyone was back where he or


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she belonged, then she would close the door soundlessly. The silence would drag on and on. The
ones nearest to the door would hold their breath, trying to hear breathing on the other side.
Eventually someone would become brave enough to open the door a crack, and if she were truly gone,
the party would resume.
The smells of holidays were fixed in DavidтАЩs memory. All the usual smells: fruit cakes and
turkeys, the vinegar that went in the egg dyes, the greenery and the thick, creamy smoke of
bayberry candles. But what he remembered most vividly was the smell of gunpowder that they all
carried at the Fourth of July gathering. The smell that permeated their hair and clothes lasted on
their hands for days and days. Their hands would be stained purple-black by berry picking, and the
color and smell were one of the indelible images of his childhood. Mixed in with it was the smell
of the sulfur that was dusted on them liberally to confound the chiggers.
If it hadnтАЩt been for Celia, his childhood would have been perfect. Celia was his cousin,
his motherтАЩs sisterтАЩs daughter. She was one year younger than David, and by far the prettiest of
all his cousins. When they were very young they promised to marry one day, and when they grew
older and it was made abundantly clear that no cousins might ever marry in that family, they
became implacable enemies. He didnтАЩt know how they had been told. He was certain that no one ever
put it in words, but they knew. When they could not avoid each other after that, they fought. She
pushed him out of the hayloft and broke his arm when he was fifteen, and when he was sixteen they
wrestled from the back door of the Winston farmhouse to the fence, fifty or sixty yards away. They
tore the clothes off each other, and he was bleeding from her fingernails down his back, she from
scraping her shoulder on a rock. Then somehow in their rolling and squirming frenzy, his cheek
came down on her uncovered chest, and he stopped fighting. He suddenly became a melting, sobbing,
incoherent idiot and she hit him on the head with a rock and ended the fight.
Up to that point the battle had been in almost total silence, broken only by gasps for
breath and whispered language that would have shocked their parents. But when she hit him and he
went limp, not unconscious, but dazed, uncaring, inert, she screamed, abandoning herself to terror
and anguish. The family tumbled from the house as if they had been shaken out, and their first
impression must have been that he had raped her. His father hustled him to the barn, presumably
for a thrashing. But in the barn his father, belt in hand, looked at him with an expression that
was furious, and strangely sympathetic. He didnтАЩt touch David, and only after he had turned and
left did David realize that tears were still running down his face.