AEgypt by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page B

not now as extensive as they once were; the big place in Cascadia was sold for a boys’ school twenty years ago, and while Rosie was growing up in the Midwest with her father and mother, the whole tissue of properties somewhat unraveled. “Arcady,” the summer place above Fair Prospect, with its fields and woods, is still theirs, though strictly speaking it belongs not to Boney Rasmussen, who lives there, but to the Rasmussen Foundation. As a child, Rosie hadn't perceived the decline, if it was one, of the Rasmussens; she had a Grandfather and a Grandmother Rasmussen in addition to Boney, a father too, and cousins, and her Sunday visits were always to one Rasmussen satrapy or another; but even in those days a kind of abstraction was setting in, was in fact well advanced, her own father's flight first to the West and then increasingly into his own fast-darkening soul (he died of an overdose of morphine when Rosie was fourteen) was only the extremest example of it. When Mike got the job here at The Woods (partly through Boney's influence, the Rasmussen Foundation still contributed to the place's existence) and Rosie returned to the Faraways, she felt a little like a princess who had awakened after being asleep for a hundred years: grandparents were dead, known houses sold to strangers, cousins departed, new blacktop highways and plastic shopping centers laid over Rasmussen pastures and horse barns. Only Boney, her grandfather's older brother, oldest of them all, old even when Rosie was a child, still survived, outliving them all. And Butterman's, her castle, to the best anyway of Boney's remembrance, was still hers or his: her castle, that she had told stories of, to herself and others, during her long life elsewhere. Between her and Mike especially the castle had been a funny bond, Rosie's castle in the Faraways, her dowry, they would take possession when they moved back there together.
    A trickle of sweat ran down her side beneath her T-shirt.
    Spofford's party is tomorrow night, she thought; Full Moon party on the river. Her heart rose, or sank. Below her, in the glassy curls of the backwater, several ducks floated, turning idly in the current, dabbling, climbing onto rocks and shaking themselves head to tail always with the same small motion.
    A swim. A long dive into dark water. Always that moment, as you leaped, when the desired water made you afraid, a moment in the middle of the air when you half-changed your mind, decided not to dive after all, a thrill of oh-no that was swept off by the cloven water's cold solidity and the bliss of being in it.
    "Okay, hey,” Gene the mechanic called to her.
    She turned back to her car. Gene was stretched out in the front seat, looking at his work from different angles while the dogs sniffed his pants leg. In the western sky a huge pile of dense cloud had arisen: thunderheads. Rosie shuddered in the heat. A storm coming soon.
* * * *
    She drove back toward Blackbury Jambs, but instead of crossing the bridge into town she took the leftward way and went north along the Shadow River road. Now at high noon the river wasn't shadowy but spangled and glittering with sundrops, with shafts of sun reaching through silvery aspens and dark firs down into its deep bed. It ran gurgling happily over its waterfalls and around the tall boots of a fisherman who stood in it casting for trout.
    The Shadow is a recreational river, or at least so billed, and has been for a long time. Down near the Jambs the vacation houses built amid the firs are stark geometries of glass and naked wood, with jutting decks and roofs sloping at surprising angles; they are “year-round” houses and several are lived in year-round by psychiatrists and administrators who work at The Woods, professionals on permanent vacation. Farther along the style changes to the passé chalet and A-frame types built ten and twenty years ago, interspersed with log cabins and even some trailers lugged laboriously into place and then