Homeplace by Anne Rivers Siddons Read Free Book Online Page B

light and cold with outrage and revelation. The rest of the classstared raptly into their Shakespeares, most of them for the first time since September. Priss went on with the lesson.
    “That was quite an outburst,” she said that afternoon, when Mike came by on her way to the library. “What on earth got into you?” She was looking at Mike very intently, as if trying to read her face for something outside Mike’s ken.
    “I don’t know,” Mike said, fidgeting a little, as she often did, under Priss’s green stare. “It just seemed all of a sudden like … I can’t explain it …”
    “It’s called an epiphany,” Priss said. “Saul of Tarsus had something similar happen to him on the road to Damascus. Fair jerked him inside out, it did. Well. Now that you’ve had your epiphany, what are you going to do about it?”
    “I don’t know,” Mike said. “I have to think about it some more. It does feel like something you have to do something about, though. Or I do. Only I can’t think what. What do you think, Priss?”
    “I think you’ll know what you ought to do when the time comes,” Priss said. “You might start with that essay. Go on to the library and see what’s there about the Civil Rights Movement … though God knows, I doubt if anything much is, in Lytton … and put some facts behind this fine new passion of yours. That’s a good place to start.”
    Mike thought, as she left, that she caught the nearest flicker of wetness in Priss’s eyes, but only one lamp was on in the dark, crowded little living room, and she could not be sure. On reflection, she thought she must have been mistaken. Priss in tears was like the madonna in a fever of sexuality, simply beyond imagining.
    “Good for you, for standing up to that jerk Cato,” Bayard Sewell said, when she told him about the incident. “But you better hope your daddy doesn’t hear about it. He’d have a fit.”
    Mike, who had been poised to tell him about the remarkable perception that had accompanied her words, did not. Somehow she had expected him to sense what she had felt, to understand, to share the fullness of it with her. She could not have said why she kept silent. He was, after all, dead right about her father. But there had been no thought in her mind of standing up to Wesley Cato; that had not been what her words were about. It was the first time their private lexicon had faltered. It disturbed her, and she did not mention it again.
    As the slow spring came on, Mike devoted herself to her essay at the library while he worked evenings at Pembroke’s Drugs, and when they met afterwards to talk of the day and the future and to hold one another and exchange their endless hungry caresses, the tremulous new truth in Mike’s heart stayed there mute between them, as warm and living and secret as an embryo.

7
    S HE WAS WORKING ON AN ESSAY FOR A CONTEST SPONSORED by the Georgia Civil Liberties Union. The prize was a year’s full scholarship, covering tuition, room and board, to the University of Georgia, and Mike yearned to present it triumphantly to her father, in the presence of Bayard Sewell, when the proper time came. She was aware that her new status as acknowledged daughter in the Winship house and her tentative favor in John Winship’s eyes had been won by Bayard Sewell and by no innate qualities of her own, and though she was not resentful of this, still, the opportunity to make such a grand gesture shone in her mind like a lit white taper.
    Neither Mike nor anyone else in Lytton with the exception of Priss Comfort, who was the administrator of the essay contest at Lytton High, would have known the Civil Liberties Union from the Supreme Court of the United States, and so Mike felt few qualms about pursuing the essay. Its subject, “The South on Fire: The Civil Rights Movement at the Crossroads,” did give her a small, electric stab every now and then, especially when she imagined her father’s reaction to her victory, but she