Orphan of Creation Read Free

overstuffed chairs, comfortably close to each other—and to the buffet table laid out specially for the occasion in the living room (which the Southern branch of the family insisted on calling the parlor), with their grown children bringing them their desserts and coffee. It was not just the food, of course. It was the family, the closeness, the love, the constant recollection of a proud past, a confident eye toward the future—and a real Thanksgiving celebration of a contented and comfortable present.
    Barbara waited in the buffet line and got the second-to-last slice of Rose’s pie, and generous helpings of two or three others of her favorites, and laughed and smiled and chattered away with everyone, and even managed to find a whole chair to herself in the crowded living room. When everyone was settled down with a plate of six kinds of dessert and all diets forgotten until tomorrow, Great-aunt Josephine led yet another grace, thanking the Lord because so many loved ones were there, because those who had “gone on ahead” (as Great-aunt Josephine delicately put it) were still honored and remembered, because those separated by distance or duty were happy and well (though Barbara had a little trouble thinking of her absent and soon-to-be-ex husband Michael as “happy”).
    There was a chorus of loud Baptist “amens” and the noise level suddenly dropped as everyone dug in, finding just room enough for dessert.
    Afterwards, the men wandered out onto Gowrie House’s wraparound porch to start playing pinochle and bridge and dominos by twilight and lamplight. A few of the more daring younger men actually snuck upstairs to get up a poker game, leaving their less rash cousins to mutter in admiration at their brazenness. Gambling, for money, right there in Aunt Josephine’s house! The children raced off to play who knows where, and the women started cleaning up after the meal. Each group went to its place and activity without anyone being told what to do, or even any of the women objecting—for today, at least—about being stuck with the dishes. It was part of the expected holiday ritual, the tradition, and Barbara found something comfortable about being in solely female company, carefully washing and drying the good china and the best silver as the women shared the latest gossip about this or that absent relative, boasting about how well the nieces and nephews were doing in school. Afterwards, the women had coffee and nibbled on the last of the desserts as they talked around the big table in Josephine’s roomy, museum-piece kitchen, a room exactly as it had been when Barbara had been born.
    The evening wore on toward night, and Barbara slipped away from the bright-lit table, collected her sweater from the front hall closet, and went outside for a stroll in the cool night. She stepped down off the porch and went out into the calm darkness, the laughter of the card players faint and close in the freshening breeze. She walked down the winding paved driveway that led to the county road.
    It had been a clear, perfect, blue-sky day, but now the last traces of sunlight went sliding beneath the western horizon and steely clouds rolled in from the south, blanking out the first stars of night even as they appeared. A distant rumble of thunder growled, a strange sound to come from a November night. Barbara stopped a few hundred feet from the house and looked back the way she had come. It was a big old place, and every generation had added onto it, the exterior of the original house nearly lost under a century of remodeling. Solid old oak trees had been planted to shade the house long decades past, and now their uppermost branches swung back and forth, thrown about by the strengthening wind.
    Ghosts lived in Gowrie House, Barbara thought to herself, friendly spirits that taught the ways of family and love and remembrance. There was a comforting presence and strength in the place.
    She heard a fluttering noise and a slight commotion