Free The Last Summer of the Camperdowns by Elizabeth Kelly Page A

the glass. I jumped. My father looked startled. A long, low, howling whistle signaled a sudden shift in the weather. Sitting up straight, startled and disoriented as if crudely ejected from a dream in which I felt loved and protected, I covered my heart with my hand.
    “What were you going to say?” Camp asked.
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    Camp patted my hand, kissed me on the cheek and said good night. As the door clicked quietly shut behind him, I got up and walked over to the window. On my knees, I looked out onto the deserted road, randomly illuminated by stars and distant lights. The quiet deepened but for the intermittent rumble of thunder and the pulsating roar of the waves as they crashed against the shoreline. I heard the casual swish of my horse’s tail where he stood beneath the tree in the paddock. The flick of Eugene’s tail, the stamp of his hoof—I’ve imprinted both. I’m habituated to them. Like cues in a stage play, they announce the next entrance.
    The shadows parted like theater curtains, and there he was, visible in the golden lamplight, a smoky puff of gloom and silence, soundless as suffocation, smoothly gliding like a snake across the surface of my fear. Tall and lean. His mouth hung open. Loose. A ramp with a broken hinge. Gula leaned slightly forward as he walked. He walked slowly. He had his mongrel dog with him, brown and sable, ears flattened against its skull, its tail hanging down, ribs visible, matted fur, tufts of hair missing, on a short taut leash. In the same hand he carried a large stick that rested rigid against the dog’s flank, a fixed reminder. They walked together, taking synchronized steps, moving in slow unison as if they were conjoined, cruelty’s ultimate cruelty.
    The dog! Oh, Hanzi! They stopped at my mother’s perennial garden. Flashes of lightning overhead illuminated him in the blackness. I could see him clearly one moment and the next moment I couldn’t see him at all. He dropped the leash. The dog slid down onto the ground in a single slinking motion. The leaves on the trees rippled. I watched as he pulled an army knife from his coat pocket and began cutting wild roses in the rain. A sudden surge of wind and the whole world seemed to shift, then bend backward at the waist. Unhurried, he went from bush to bush, collecting orange, yellow, red, white and pink blossoms, oblivious of all that was blowing around him, unmindful of me.
    I let the curtain slide slowly back into place as he and his dog vanished into the blackness. Gula was picking roses in a storm in the dead of night and I couldn’t have been more afraid than if I’d witnessed him digging his own shallow grave beneath the moonlight.
    Back in bed, I tried in vain to sleep. After a while, it started to rain lightly, then hard. Rain sprayed through the open window and made tiny pools on the pine floor. I jumped to my feet and closed the window, the wind banging against the glass to get in. Raindrops from the giant oak tree clinked downward against the gutter, a cascade of individual coppery notes clanging like unlucky pennies.
    You could see the ocean from my bathroom, a kind of simmering, limitless horizon of hope or doom, depending on the day. We were on top of a cliff, the highest point of a series of graduated dunes—the lowest point towered one hundred feet above the Great Beach, which was accessible only by a narrow wooden staircase built into the sand on a sheer vertical angle. The obliterating view of the ocean and the sky from the edge of the bluff was nothing short of astounding, made all the more so for its utter lack of announcement—you couldn’t see anything at all until you were right at the edge and then you could see nothing else—and left the uninitiated wordless.
    “Edmund Burke would say that what you’re experiencing is true astonishment,” my father used to tell gaping first-time visitors. “The terror and beauty of the sublime.”
    “As a bonus, along with the view, comes