A Place to Call Home Read Free

scrutinized me. “Carlton’s a weasel,” I explained finally.
    Mama nodded. “You told the truth. That’s fine. You’re done. I’m proud of you.”
    “Then how come everybody’s lookin’ at me like I’m weird?”
    “Because you are,” Rebecca blurted out. “Aren’t you scared of Roanie Sullivan?”
    “He didn’t laugh at me when I was dancing. I think he’s okay.”
    “You’ve got a strange way of sortin’ things out,” Evan said.
    “She’s one brick short of a load,” Hop added.
    So that was the year I realized Roanie was not just trashy, not just different, he was dangerous, and taking his side was a surefire way to seed my own mild reputation as a troublemaker and Independent Thinker.
    I was fascinated by him from then on.
    The world in general didn’t even know that Dunderry, Georgia, existed. I searched for us on the enameled globe in the living room and we weren’t there. We were barely find-able on the creased, coffee-stained road map of Georgia that Mama and Daddy kept in the glove compartment of our station wagon. Atlanta rated a fat star and Gainesville was marked with a circle. But Dunderry was only a black dot. We lived an inch to the left of Gainesville and an inch and a half above Atlanta.
    We had peace and quiet, a beautiful little courthouse square with tree-lined streets, and sweet, handsome, old homes, big farms tucked in broad, lush valleys, and cathedral-like mountains around it all, to keep us safe.
    Our ancestors would still have recognized the town they’d founded, despite electricity, paved roads, indoor plumbing, and monuments to five wars—including the one that left a dozen young Dunderry men dead in far-off states and gave us, in return, four anonymous Yankee soldiers whose graves at the edge of the First Baptist Church’s cemetery had become a tourist attraction.
    I asked Mama, who was a Delaney by birth and a Maloney by marriage—in other words, she stood proudly at the crossroads of the two oldest families in Dunderry—if we were as small as the map said. “Don’t you worry,” she told me. “If you study an ant under a magnifying glass, it’s as big as an elephant. Size is all in how you look at things, and we’re very big.”
    I pointed out that Hop had held a magnifying glassover an ant in the front yard once and after a minute in the sun it had looked like a Rice Krispie with legs. Mama studied me the way she did when I stumped her and then she told me to stop thinking so much.
    But I decided we’d better be careful how we looked at ourselves.
    Mama’s great-grandparents, Glen and Fiona Delaney, immigrated from Ireland in 1838, the same year as the Maloneys. But they were educated shopkeepers, born and raised in the city of Dublin, while the Maloneys were descended from illiterate tenant farmers in the Irish backcountry. More important, the Delaneys were Protestant and my father’s ancestors, the Maloneys, Catholic. Glen and Fiona established Dunderry’s first drygoods store and the first bank and built the first two-story house in town, and Glen was elected the first county magistrate. He and Fiona supported the Union during the Civil War, and their two oldest sons served in General Grant’s army. The Dunderry Home Guard retaliated by looting the drygoods store and burning the Delaney buggy shed. A Maloney, my great-great-grandfather Liam, was the Home Guard’s captain.
    So pride, class, religion, and politics kept several generations of Delaneys and Maloneys from intermarrying, even as they all gradually turned into prosperous Methodist Democrats. It took more than a hundred years until Mama and Daddy broke the stalemate.
    Great-Grandfather Howard Maloney built the house I grew up in, on the foundation of a log cabin his grandfather Sean had built. It is where my Grandpa Joseph Maloney and his five brothers were born, and where Daddy and all six of his brothers and sisters were born.
    Each generation added to it like a hope chest; by the time my