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Chapter 2
- University Press of Mississippi
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TWO IN LOCH drove Ruth in his pick-up truck that night to a house located not a mile away, yet he had to go through town to reach it, for the old road that had joined his home to the valley where Elinor and Lance Gerrard lived was grown up in weeds now and crossed by stout fences. There had once stood in this valley a mansion known as Walston Cedars after the man who had built it there. He was a South Carolina man named Marshall Walston, one who had managed to be at once both pioneer and citizen. He had purchased from the Indians a sweep of acreage that cupped around Tarsus in a half-moon toward the south. He had found the oval, grassy valley where three hills rose, just missing symmetry. The center hill was black from fire. Marshall Walston planted cedars on it, built the great white house at its foot, moved in and waited for them to grow. The house faced town. Backwardto the northeast a Scottish family named McKie settled in rougher land, and due north a mile away, Ernest Armstrong, Kinloch's grandfather, built a plain house on a hill. The three houses formed a rough triangle. They were part of a section still known as "the-land-west-of-town," though in former days the phrase had held a greater significance. Then the land was populous and rich; from the valleys its hills sloped strong and high, kneedeep in resilient leaf mold that crackled under foot, guarded against erosion by chestnut, sycamore, beach, elm, oak and chinkapin, solid, muscular trees that had grown straining backward to the sky. But all the former Walston land was now the property of the Gerrards , and most of its high hills were bare. It had been rumored for years that old Simon Gerrard had wished to rebuild Walston Cedars for his own home. Then just before the depression Simon's son Lance9 K lot married Elinor Dudley and they had not lived in the Gerrard house two months before the carpenters were in Walston Gap. On a street in Tarsus the new bungalow might have appeared only moderately small; in the center of the broad green valley, it looked like a doll's house. In winter, when oak and beech trees along the Armstrong road were bare, the house was dimly visible through the outlying pines, but one must be expecting to see it to find it at all and it disappeared entirely when the thinnest rain clouded the space between . Now the still waxing upsurge of half-tropical growth covered and re-covered the filtered view. Kinloch drove through Tarsus; he passed by the courthouse square where Simon Gerrard's house, flush with turrets, balconies and dark stained glass bulked on one corner; he took the Delta road until just this side of Hangman's Hill. Here a drive branched off, proceeded sharply down hill, curved into a lonely place where the ground was always damp and cool, and squaring left broke into the open valley. Trees on the hill made a melancholy line of black, darker in the twilight than in the night time. The grass was tall and wild; the visitor looked twice to discover what he had come such a way to find. But there it was, the sleek, expensive bungalow, and the many lighted windowsin the living room were casting a bold sheet of light, quickly lost in the darkness of the bolder landscape. Kinloch could remember wandering through the valley as a child, watching with respect to their stern and upright nakedness the four charred chimneys that had stood there through time and weather until the construction company came to start the bungalow. Kinloch had never seen Walston Cedars, he reflected as he drove into the valley; and he had never seen its last owner, young Kinloch Walston, the man whose name he bore. But he knew the story of how the great house had burned one night and how his father, Daniel Armstrong, returning from the field just at dark, saw his own windows ablaze 10 [3.89.56.228] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:58 GMT) with reflected light and began to run, shouting to his wife to save the children. She had gone to the edge of the bluff to watch and when Daniel saw his own window frames untouched by smoke and looked behind where the broad flames splashed over the sky, he...