The Reservoir by John Milliken Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

was narrow, and her eyebrows rose with almost everything she said, giving her a haughty look. She made some comment about the heat and the lack of good rain, then took her sister in hand and made her way back up to the house. Her dark hair was braided and twisted tightly to the back of her head; from behind she could be taken for an adult, with her black dress and her proudly erect walk.
    Not so the girl who had tagged him. Tommie wandered down to the icehouse, looking for his brother. He peered into the darkness, inhaling the cold vapor that felt so otherworldly on a hot day. The girl came along again, this time by herself, but still running, her brown ringlets bobbing and white dress sliding ghostlike over the clipped grass. She tagged him again and as he turned to say something, his brother jumped out from behind the icehouse and grabbed her by the wrist. She struggled to free herself. “What’s the matter with you,” Willie said, “running around here like a little hellion?”
    “You oughten to cuss.” A blush spread across her marble-white cheeks. She almost had a woman’s shape, yet everything—her hands, her feet, her features, even her voice—seemed diminutive.
    “And speaking up to her elders too,” Willie said, letting go her hand.
    “You ain’t my elders either.” She swept a curl off her forehead.
    Willie laughed. “I know you. You’re Fannie Lillian, and almost grown up since last summer.”
    “Lillian.”
    “What?”
    “It’s not Fannie Lillian anymore, it’s just Lillian. Or Lillie.” She sniffed out, as though challenging him.
    Tommie remembered his cousin now—really his mother’s brother’s granddaughter, which made her and her many brothers and sisters his first cousins once removed. Except slightly more removed, his mother had said, because the brother was a half-brother. She said it in a kind of disparaging way, as though this branch of the family was not one she was proud of.
    “Well then, Lillian,” Willie said, “What have you got to say for yourself?”
    “Nothing to you.” She had run off while he was telling her how sassy she was, but not before taking a closer look at Tommie, who said nothing at all. There was a mischievous smile about her lips as she turned and wisped up over the lawn like a spirit. Then he and Willie went and sat at the edge of the hayfield and he told Willie he wished he were not going off to Aberdeen. Willie said not to be stupid—he, Tommie, was the smart one, the one who needed an education. “All I want is right here,” Willie said. “And someday my own buggy, and a horse to go with it. Maybe even a wife.”
    “I want to go places,” Tommie said. “See the Taj Mahal and elephants and New York and Paris.”
    “The burlesque shows?”
    “Maybe,” Tommie said, blushing.
    “You can see an elephant up in Richmond. John Griswold saw one at a circus there.” Tommie said it would be nice just to see Richmond.
    Before school started, his father took him up to Richmond for a day. Aunt Jane wanted to treat them to dinner at a hotel restaurant, but, not wishing to hurt her brother-in-law’s pride, she ended up just giving Tommie a little spending money and packing him a lunch in a paper sack.
    Two years later Lillian came to live with them after some unspecified trouble in her home. She had been at Cedar Lane more than a month when Tommie returned home from Aberdeen for the summer. She and Willie had started out shy with each other but had become friends, and sometimes even fought like brother and sister. Now Tommie found himself the interloper in his own home. His young cousin seemed to enjoy tormenting him, mocking him whenever he tried to discuss Plato or Shakespeare at the dinner table. “I guess there’s no point in trying to be civilized around here,” he said, glaring at her.
    She smiled sweetly. “You could learn to be civilized if you tried,” she said. “You could say please pass the butter, instead of reaching across the table