On Agate Hill Read Free Page A

like that we walked kicking leaves up the hill to the house where they were laying out little Junius mother in the bedroom and big Junius was beating his head bloody on the brick kitchen wall behind the house. We walked right past him into the kitchen.
    I bet yall are hungry aint you? Liddy said. She set us all down at the table and gave us some chicken and dumplings out of the big black pot. We ate like wild animals as Fannie used to say. It was nice and warm in the kitchen with that big fire glowing. Here honey dont you want some more? Liddy asked and even little Junius ate another whole plateful. I dont know if he knew his mamma was dead or not.
    That was seven months ago, and things around here have gone to hell in a handbasket ever since. Nora Gwyn and Mister Gwyn do not know the half of it. But they have come only to say good bye to Uncle Junius as they are moving to Tennessee where Mister Gwyn will be the headmaster at a new boys school, old sourpuss Presbyterian he has got a poker up his ass as Selena says.
    Uncle Junius and Mister Gwyn and Nora Gwyn are sipping sherry wine in the parlor down below me as I write.
    Now dont you want to know where I am? For you could never find me in a million years. This is my number one hiding place in all the world, a cubbyhole right in the heart of the house yet invisible and unknown to all. Come see. Nora Gwyn says you will be my friend and now you will be my guest, I have never had one before.
    But first you will have to come out here to Agate Hill so you will be riding up from the Haw River on the road and then along our dusty lane with trees and fields on either side. The land will rise as you come up and up, yet so slowly that it will surprise you to turn and look back to see the countryside spread out like a dreamy quilt below you now, orchards and woods and overgrown fields with piled-up rock walls between them. White quartz rocks stand out in the fields. You can find agate and fools gold too at the very top of the rise behind the house where I often climb though I am not allowed to.
    I love to sneak down the back stairs in the night time and run across the yard from tree to tree and up the rocky path to lie on the big flat rock which stays warm from the sun long into the night. I call it my Indian Rock. I love to lie there flat on my back and let the wind blow over me which is not like any other feeling ever felt by anybody else in the world I am sure of it, known only by me and now by you, my friend of this diary. Sometimes the moon is so bright it is nearly like day and casts shadows among the rocks. One time I fell asleep on my rock and slept there all night long until King Arthur started crowing in the dawn, THEN I had to skedaddle. Liddy and Old Bess both saw me from the kitchen door but they did not tell, they gave me a corn pone and sent me on my way.
    I am like a ghost girl wafting through this ghost house seen by none. I truly think I would blow away save for this piece of fools gold I keep here in my pocket for good luck. Often I take it out and turn it this way and that in the sun just to see it shine. Mamma loved gold jewelry but I am not a thing like Mamma. I am NOT. I like rocks instead. All of her jewelry is gone to theYankees now except for a few pieces which Selena has wheedled out of Uncle Junius. I have to say, it kills me to see Mammas jade ring from the Orient on the little finger of Selenas fat hand and the coral bead necklace around her neck, I wish it would choke her dead.
    Anyway you will come up the lane past the falling down sawmill and the gin and the two big barns one empty now, and then you will ride into the grove of cedar trees where it is always dark and the soft needles rustling. It smells good in there too. When you come out you will be here at Agate Hill plantation which was never a real plantation at all in Mammas opinion, not even before the War, not such as Perdido which she left behind in South Carolina.
    This house was once white of