Summer Solstice
THE SUMMER SOLSTICE
The Moretas were spending St.John's day with the children's grandfather, those feast-day it was. Dona Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound of screaming in her ears. In the dinning room the three boys, already attired in their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her, talking at once.
"How long you have slept, Mama!"
"We thought you were never getting up!"
"Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?"
"Hush, hush, I implore you. Now look: your father has a headache,
and so have I. So be quiet this instant or no one goes to Grandfather"
Thought it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnance,the windows dilating with the harsh the
light and the air already burning with the immense, intense fever of noon.
She found the children's nurse working in the kitchen. "And why is it you who are preparing breakfast? Where is Amada?". But without waiting for an answer she went to the backdoor and opened it, and the screaming in her ears became wild screaming in the stables across the yard. "Oh, my God!" she groaned and, grasping her skirts, hurried across the yard.
In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams, was hitching the pair of piebald ponies to the coach.
"Not the close coach, Entoy! The open carriage!" shouted Dona Lupeng as she came up.
"But the dust, Senora-"
"I know, But better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your wife, eh? Have you been beating her again?"
"Oh, no, senora,I have not touched her."
"Then why she is screaming? Is she ill?"
"I don't think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, senora. She is up there."
When Dona Lupeng entered the roo., the big half-naked woman sprawled across the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Dona Lupeng was shocked.
"What is this Amada?" Why are you still in the...
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