Eden Burning Read Free Page A

Geographic.”
    “You read the
Geographic!”
    “I’ve a friend. He was my teacher when I went to school. He keeps it for me.”
    “I see.”
    Clyde spoke eagerly. The words came out fast, as if he were afraid someone would stop him before he was finished. “I read a lot. I guess I’ve about read everything in the Covetown library. Well, not quite. I like history the best, how we all got to be what we are, you know—” He stopped, as if this time he feared having said too much.
    He wants to show us how much he knows, Tee thought, sensing now not only the mocking pride which had been her first impression, but also something humble. It made her uncomfortable.
    But Père appeared to be delighted. “Oh, I know you’re a reader, Clyde! And that’s wonderful! Reading is all there is to knowledge. Reading, not classrooms…. Oh, I’ve been collecting books all my life. I’ve got books from as far back as when the English took this island from the French in—”
    “In 1782, when Admiral Rodney beat the French at the Battle of the Saints.”
    “Listen to that, Tee! Listen to what the boy knows! Didn’t I tell you Clyde was smart?”
    He is treating him like a performing monkey, Tee thought.
    Père stood up. “Well, Clyde, you may borrow all the books you want from me. Any time. As long as your hands are clean when you touch them. Come, Tee, it’s time. We’re having guests at dinner.”
    “Père,” Tee said when they were inside, “that was insulting. Telling him about clean hands.”
    Père was astonished. She had never spoken to him thatway. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They don’t mind. They’re not as sensitive as you are.”
    How could he know? How could he say such a thing? And yet he was so kind, Père was. Who else would invite a colored workman to sit down with them? Mama certainly would not, nor would Uncle Herbert.
    “Bigotry, besides being stupid and cruel, stains the personality,” Père liked to say. Yet there was this contradiction in him.
    Another thing to puzzle over! The world, as you grew older, kept presenting things to puzzle over. There were many vague thoughts in her head, circling there like bees: thoughts about places beyond the island and times before the island and how people came to be what they are …
    “You are much too serious,” Mama complained, not unkindly. “I wish you could just learn to take pleasure out of life.”
    And Tee would think, Your pleasures are not mine. I’m not pretty enough for your pleasures anyway, even if I wanted them. And if I had your beauty, I wouldn’t know what to do with it, how to laugh and touch Uncle Herbert on the cheek when he stands there adoring you in a room full of people. What I need is someone to talk to, really talk, without having to be afraid that I’m boring, or childish, or asking too many questions.
    Père was growing too old for her. Suddenly that summer one saw that he was losing vigor and patience. Often he forgot what he was saying. He began to sleep away the afternoons. Eleuthera grew lonely.
    So now, after the noon meal, Tee would wander into the coolness and sweet wood scent of the library to read or watch Clyde chisel a floral wreath on a cornice. There was something soothing in the tapping noises of the little hammer and in his soft whistle of concentration …
    One day she read aloud from the ancient diary.
    “‘July, seventeen hundred and three. Time of great woe.My wife’s brother and four of his children dead of the fever. There is scarcely a family that has not suffered dreadful loss.’ Whatever made people come to this wilderness in the first place, Clyde? I can’t imagine myself doing it!”
    “Poverty, Miss Tee. There was no work in Europe and what there was paid badly. These islands weren’t populated by the rich.”
    He was reminding her that her ancestors hadn’t been aristocrats. She saw the humor in that and didn’t mind. Sometimes, lately, she surprised herself with her own