Verwandte Artikel zu Swan

Swan - Hardcover

Mayes, Frances

 
9780767902854: Swan
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767902858 ISBN 13: 9780767902854
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

When the body of her mother, a suicide nineteen years earlier, is mysteriously exhumed, Ginger Mason returns to her small Georgia hometown from her life as an archaeologist in Italy and is reunited with her troubled, reclusive brother J. J., as dark secrets and startling truths about their family and their town begin to surface. A first novel. 75,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frances Mayes’s Tuscany memoirs, all published by Broadway Books, have a combined total of 2,000,000 copies in print. She is also the author of The Discovery of Poetry and five books of poetry. A native of Georgia, she now divides her time between San Francisco and Cortona, Italy.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

J. J. stood on the end of the dock, feeling as if the four pilings might rip loose in the current and send him rafting. But the dock held. He loved the smell of rivers. In July heat, in wavy air, in the throbbing of cicadas, in the first light on the river, he was what he would call happy. A full moon angled down between pines, casting a spiraling silver rope across the curve of the water. He watched the light, flicking through his mind for words to describe it. Luminous, flashing. Ordinary. The light seemed liquid, alive, annealed to the water, too changeable for any word. The river rode high after two storms. A cloud of gnats swarmed his foot, then moved as a single body over a swirl in the current. He stepped out of his faded red bathing suit--automatically he pulled on this suit every morning when he got out of bed--and climbed down the ladder into the water. His morning libations, he called this routine. In all the good months, and sometimes in the cold ones just for sheer cussedness, he dipped himself in the river early in the morning. Near the dock he could stand on the bottom, feeling the swiftness or languidness of the current, sometimes jumping as a fish nipped at the hairs on his legs and chest. He floated for a minute, listening to water whirl around his head, letting himself be carried, then turned his body sharply and swam over to the crescent of washed-sand beach his parents had cleared years ago. From there he could walk out of the river and follow a trace covered in pine needles back to the dock. He noticed a fallen sourwood sapling, tangled with muscadine vines, and leaned to pull it out of the water. As he jerked loose the roots, a wedge of earth cleaved from the bank, spilling dirt onto his wet legs. At his feet he saw something white--a bone, a stick bleached by the sun? He waded back into the river and rinsed off.

Maybe what he glimpsed was an arrowhead. J. J. had found hundreds. He turned over the earth with his foot. There--he picked it up, blew off the dirt, and washed it. Never had he found one of these. He held a perfect bone fish spear, three inches long, with exquisitely carved barbs like a cat's claws on each side. He admired the skill--the delicate hooked end of each barb would bite into flesh while the fisherman dragged in the fish. At one end he saw slight ridges where the line was tied over and over by the Creek Indian who once fished these waters. Ginger, he thought, Ginger should see this. But his sister's green eyes were light-years away. He pawed through the dirt and pulled out other roots from the bank, but found only a smashed can. What a beauty, this small spear in the palm of his hand. He took in a breath of pine air as far as he could, the air driving out of his head the familiar surge of what felt similar to hunger and thirst. Ginger was not there, so to whom could he show his treasure? He regarded it intently for himself. He had no talent for needing someone else. He shook his hair and banged the side of his head to knock the water out of his ear. Rainy night in Georgia, he mocked himself. Last train to Clarksville.

He dressed in khaki shorts, not bothering with underwear. Six-thirty and already hot, heavily hot, steamy hot, the best weather. Nothing to eat in the refrigerator but some rice and a piece of left-over venison from a week ago, when he'd brought Julianne, the new schoolteacher from Osceola, out here. She said it was so interesting that he lived way in the woods all alone. As down-to-earth as she looked, she turned out to be afraid for her feet to touch the bottom of the river. She hung on to his back, her laugh verging toward a squeal, and he felt her soft thighs on his. She was hot to the touch, even under water. But then she couldn't eat venison because she thought of Bambi. She cooked the rice, which, as he remembered, had hard kernels at the center of the grain. Then she looked at his wild salad as though it were a cow pie. J. J. often went for days eating only greens he picked and fish he caught. He chewed slowly, watching her. If she was beautiful, as Liman MacCrea had promised, why did he think her skin looked so stretched tight across her face that it might split like a blown-up pork bladder? And eyes that close together made a person look downright miserly.

Then he rubbed his temples and looked again. A pleasant face, kind and expectant. Warm. What is she wanting? he wondered as she smiled. Then he noticed her teeth, which were ground down, like an old deer's.

"Pokeweed and lamb's-quarters? I've heard of dandelion greens before. Can you eat these? That's so interesting." She pushed the fresh, pungent greens around with her fork. With the one bite she took, grit crunched between her teeth. Something she saw in his eyes appealed to her, some waiting quality. Not just a flirt or the good ol' boy he sometimes appeared to be, he was someone to solve, she told herself as she changed into her bathing suit in his room. She looked carefully at his things, comparing her own box bedroom to his, her pink chenille spread and the prints of Degas dancers on the wall, the lace curtains and view out onto an empty street, to his crammed bookcases, twenty or more ink pens, mounted fish and deer heads, his rough Indian blanket on the bed. I have no way to reach him, she thought, and would I want to? She felt suddenly tired but practiced a big smile in the mirror, lifting her thick chestnut hair off her neck. Her teeth gleamed white and even. The new red maillot certainly showed off her Scarlett O'Hara waist. "Cherry Bomb," she whispered. Cherry Bomb had been her nickname at Sparta High, when she was Homecoming queen. But that was twelve years ago. She wished she had washed the lovely greens because she was not about to eat grit.

J. J. thought if she said "so interesting" again, he'd drive the fork through her eyes. He poured glasses of bourbon. "Let's toast your seventh-grade class who gets to spend all that time with you." She lowered her eyes with pleasure, which shamed him. Was he becoming a God damned hermit? He wondered how he would feel with her legs wrapped around him. Lost in outer space? He knew he'd find fault with Christ Almighty. She played the flute, had a degree in music education. So what if she turned freaky in the woods? Still, he had felt a tidal wave of boredom flood through him, a craving to be alone so intense that he shuddered. Although he'd expected to be driving her home at one or two in the morning, top down, a little night music, he was burning up the road at nine-thirty.

He made a pot of coffee and heated Julianne's leftover clump of bad rice with some butter. The kitchen table was littered with chert, flint, a flat stone, and two antlers. Lately, he'd tried to teach himself flintnapping, using only tools the Indians had used. He'd ordered A Guide to Flintworking and driven over to a rock shop in Dannon to buy pieces big enough to work. He wanted to make a stone knife for gutting fish, but so far he'd split a lot of stones and created a pile of waste flakes and chips. One try, by accident, actually resembled a scraper.

He held up the fish spear to the sunlight at the window, admiring the fine symmetry. Balancing coffee, bowl, and notebook, the spear held lightly between his teeth, he pushed open the kitchen door with his elbow. Yellow jackets worked the scuppernongs, and bees burrowed into the rose that sprawled among the vines, his mother's yellow rose, still blooming and her gone an eon, a suicide. He did not want to think about that. She had loved the cabin as much as he did. Her rose had long since climbed from the arbor and bolted into the trees. He placed the fish spear on a piece of white paper and opened his notebook to record his find. July 7, he wrote. The early sun through the grape arbor cast mottled light onto the table. He might love the light at the cabin even more than...

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767902858
ISBN 13 
9780767902854
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
319
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Verantwortliche Person
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