"Sarah A. Hoyt - The Blood Like Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoyt Sarah A)

bedsheets, a struggling voice, breathing that sank slowly, slowly, into a harsh rasp at the throat. Then
nothing.
The neighbor women had looked after my father in his last days, community being the only palliative for
the harsh, grinding poverty of peasant France.

Just before the end, I was admitted to the small, dim room at the back of the house and allowed near the
dank little pile of bedding, where my father lay.

His grey hair had grown all white through his illness, and his face had sunken, the skin drying and
stretching, till it looked like parchment layered over the skull. His aquiline nose looked sharper, and his
dark brown eyes smaller, opaque, lost amid the yellow skin, the white hair, the sharp nose.

He smiled and it was the smile of a skull, his irregular teeth gaping at me as I approached.

The hand that stretched out of the pile of covers and grasped my small, soft hand looked more like a
claw, with long, yellowed nails. And there was the smell of death in the breath that flew past my face as
my father spoke..

“Sylvie,” he said. His eyes were soft, sadly sweet when he looked at me. “Sylvie, my daughter, you are
too beautiful. Marry someone soon. Marry one of our neighbors. Don’t let your beauty lure you outside
your sphere. That beauty can be a curse.”

Uncomprehending, I listened. Uncomprehending, I held his hand.

Though girls little older than I were often married, I had no thought for such a thing. As for leaving the
neighborhood, I dreamt about it every day and every night and prayed upon it to any listening divinity as I
told the beads of my rosary with the other women at my father’s wake.

I knew I was beautiful and looked older than I was. I’d often seen the effect of that beauty in the lingering
glance of passing coachmen, in the appreciative look of merchants in the weekly market.

I dreamt of leaving behind the small, dark streets, the smell of stale smoke and shit, the memory of my
father’s rasping breath sinking lower and lower into nothing.

He was thirty-two when he died. I had no intention of dying young.

==========

Leaving the hotel parking lot, I drove away into darkness.

In the eastern United States, where I had lived for a time, as the sun went down other lights came up:
neon lights of gas stations and drive-throughs, lights that shone on billboards, lights of hotels and motels
and restaurants. All of them shone from the side of the road, turning the night into a continuous sunset and
reminding me of what I could no longer experience.

But out west the sun went down and night came on, like a blanket obliterating all life, all reminders of life.

Driving at night, between Denver and the little town of Goldport nestled up against the Rockies, I saw no
light.