Long Upon the Land by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online

hers would even know that word, much less utter it over dinner.
    Sue smiles as she remembers that conversation. Tempting as it is, annoying her mother is not worth the price. Go back to school? Sit in airless classrooms for another three or four years? Even a leper colony would be preferable to that. At least she’d be outdoors and there would be zebras and elephants and maybe a lion or two.
    Dad is right, though. More and more opportunities are opening up for women, but she cannot think of a single nine-to-five job that appeals to her. She isn’t lazy and she doesn’t mind hard work but it’s silly to think of New York, Paris, or Rome if it means she’d still be in an office doing the same boring thing over and over. For the first time in her life, she wishes she were more creative. Dad says she has good common sense, but what’s the good of common sense if she can’t find a sensible use for it? She can’t go on drifting like this.
    “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal.”
    For more than six years, those words have echoed in her head, yet here she is, six years closer to the grave and still no goal in sight.
    “You only get one life,” Mac had said. “Don’t waste it.”
    Maybe Zell has the right idea. Marry someone nice, raise a family, and do good works. Zell has joined a book club that plans to raise enough money for a library truck that will give farmers and their families easy access to books, which could change a child’s life, broaden his horizons.
    She turns off the highway onto a rough dirt road that curves through pines and tall bare-branched oaks, then into a narrow lane surrounded by fields planted in winter rye. Under a gray and leaden sky, the rye has a dull, pinched look, as if hunkering down to wait out the cold before turning bright green again. Sue realizes that she doesn’t know who currently rents the farm nor even what these fields will grow come springtime. Tobacco, yes, but what else? Corn? Soybeans? Sweet potatoes?
    The lane ends up at the ruins of the abandoned tenant house surrounded by pecan trees. Half the roof has fallen in and all that’s left are some foundation stones that still support the wooden floor and a fire-blackened stone chimney. Shortly after she learned to drive, she and Zell came out with hot dogs and camping gear. They built a fire in the old hearth and planned to spend the night until a puff adder slithered out from behind one of the stones in the fireplace. Normally she could talk her sister into anything, but Zell drew the line at snakes. She went back to the car and refused to get out again until they were safely back in Dobbs.
    Patches of bright yellow daffodils once grew on either side of the door and huge gardenia bushes still flower there in the summer with fragrant white blossoms. The girls and their grandmother used to come pick flowers for the church and Grandmother would tell them of driving out from town in a horse and buggy with her father to check on the crops and speak to the family that worked the land back then.
    “Every fall, the farmer would give us a big bag of pecans,” she tells the girls, “and in the summer, his wife always sent us home with sweet corn, tomatoes, and the best piccalilli you ever tasted. Not too vinegary. Mama never could get her to give the proportions. I guess everybody needs something special of their very own.”
    Sue is ten years old and the idea of making memorable piccalilli so seizes her imagination that she asks their housekeeper to teach her how.
    “Why you want to do that?” Mary asks, but for once Mrs. Stephenson encourages her daughter’s fanciful notion.
    “In fact, it’s time both you girls learned how to cook a little so that you can manage if your housekeeper suddenly gets sick or quits,” she says, and she asks Mary to let them help her in the kitchen.
    Zell takes to it enthusiastically and begins to collect cookbooks and recipes, but Sue loses interest once she learns the