The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Putnam Tradition, by Sonya Hess Dorman

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Title: The Putnam Tradition

Author: Sonya Hess Dorman

Illustrator: Schelling

Release Date: October 1, 2008 [EBook #26743]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

_Through generations
the power has descended,
now weaker, now stronger.
And which way did the
power run in the four-year-old
in the garden, playing
with a pie plate?_

_the
putnam
tradition_

By S. DORMAN

Illustrated by SCHELLING

It was an old house not far from the coast, and had descended generation
by generation to the women of the Putnam family. Progress literally went
by it: a new four-lane highway had been built two hundred yards from the
ancient lilacs at the doorstep. Long before that, in the time of Cecily
Putnam's husband, power lines had been run in, and now on cold nights
the telephone wires sounded like a concert of cellos, while inside with
a sound like the breaking of beetles, the grandmother Cecily moved
through the walls in the grooves of tradition.

Simone Putnam, her granddaughter; Nina Putnam, her great-granddaughter;
the unbroken succession of matriarchs continued, but times the old woman
thought that in Simone it was weakened, and she looked at the
four-year-old Nina askance, waiting, waiting, for some good sign.

Sometimes one of the Putnam women had given birth to a son, who grew
sickly and died, or less often, grew healthy and fled. The husbands were
usually strangers to the land, the house, and the women, and spent a
lifetime with the long-lived Putnam wives, and died, leaving their
strange signs: telephone wires, electric lights, water pumps, brass
plumbing.

Sam Harris came and married Simone, bringing with him an invasion of
washer, dryer, toaster, mixer, coffeemaster, until the current poured
through the walls of the house with more vigor than the blood in the old
woman's veins.

"You don't approve of him," Simone said to her grandmother.