Free Letty Fox by Christina Stead

speak no scandal, no, nor listen to it.” Cecily also thought only the pure could love. She wouldn’t listen to scandal, no one could have a good time with her. She was lonely; she wasn’t human. When the boy from the stone house down the road, a tall good-looking boy, blond, with good clothes, Carl Lokart, started to wait for her at the bottom of the orchard, she believed it was love. She was invited to the stone house for biscuits in the afternoon too, and allowed to read Carl’s books with him. Jacky and I were never invited there. Of course, we had played too many tricks down there in full view of the house. The lawn and gardens ran down to the road without a fence, and we had gone gathering flowers in the gardens without permission and given Cecily the bouquet to take to Mrs. Lokart. At another time, when two boys escaped from Farmington and the countryside was in terror by night, we stole some things from the kitchen window and from the shed in order to scare the people; but we laughed so much while getting off with the loot that perhaps we were seen from the numerous windows. There is no telling now, but then we thought Cecily had told on us and we hated her. Uncle Perce, while reproving us, would also give her a sermon about silly girls and calf love; and, oddly enough, when he was scolding anyone he was not such a fool as at other times, but showed a knowledge of human nature. What he said was so true that even we felt awkward, but we laughed loudly at her. Mrs. Dr. Goodsir looked sideways at her, embarrassed, and said, “She is precocious; she knows what she ought not.”
    Everyone came to feel she was a criminal or would end badly. The adults knew she wanted to love as they did and felt that love of the body was theirs; they watched over it. The little boys had already invited us behind the bushes, using fence language with great honesty; and like old women we knew secrets we did not tell Cecily.
    Somehow the boys at Farmington got mixed up in it. Straying round the roads, Mrs. Goodsir said, Cecily might meet some of those awful boys. “What do the boys do?” asked Cecily. Mrs. Goodsir was old-fashioned, modest and monitory, especially as she herself had been seduced and abandoned by Dr. Goodsir. The countryside for us was awfully darkened by our ideas of what the Farmington boys did and by local tales, as of the man who went berserk when his farm was taken away from him, and who had to be hunted by the police, the army, the American Legion, a band of armed neighbors, and, at length, an army plane. The army plane discovered him running through the long grass at night, like a bleached wolf. In town we saw the house which he had lost, and where his mind went.
    There was another story of a farm far over on the other hills where everything was dead; the farm was covered with skeletons of things dead of hunger and thirst. There was a lawyer down the road who had bought up all the farms and bits of land that came into the market cheap for taxes and such. He was land-hungry, and now land-poor; he scarcely had enough to eat, but he had all this land, much of it waste. Even on Lydnam Hill there was a soft worthless bit of land that would hardly grow wood, where the cows browsed. It turned out later that an old man had drowned himself there. He just got too old, he said; and he lay down and died in the wood.
    Cecily had an appetite for these stories. She loved the night. She slept out on the grass. One summer night we saw her walking naked between the garage and the house. The sky was bright with stars. This seemed awful to us, and Cecily was clothed for us in mystery and danger from that night on. But we thought her foolish too; we knew she invited the haunting, tearing hand of the road. She knew the stories of the whole countryside, especially the foul and uncanny ones; and many afternoons when she was free she spent looking across to the Farmington Institution, trying to think what life must