A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton Read Online Free PDF Page A

would be. We’ll have to start doing those things every day.”
    “What else do we needs ter be doin’?” said Emma, already starting to think herself one of us and getting excited too as she began to catch on to Katie’s scheme. “I kin help. Please let me help!”
    “You need to get yourself strong again,” said Katie, “and take care of William,” she added, nodding to the little bundle asleep in her lap. “When the time comes, you’ll get to do plenty of work around here—won’t she, Mayme?”
    “I reckon so,” I said, smiling over at Emma. “Don’t you worry none, girl—there’s gonna be plenty for us all to do.”
    “I kin work, Miz Mayme. I’ll work real hard!”
    I turned again to Katie.
    “You lived here with your mama, Miss Katie,” I said. “You know what it was like. So you have to remember the things we need to do.”
    “I’ll try, Mayme.”
    “We’re gonna have to go into town again too. We’re gonna need things, and we need to keep Mrs. Hammond thinking that everything’s normal.”
    “The first thing I’ll start doing is to weed the flower garden,” said Katie. “I’ll do that today.”
    “And I’ll clean up the broken dishes. You’ll have to show me where you put the garbage.”
    The next day we both worked pretty hard. Emma tried to help some but was mostly in the way, pestering us with her scatterbrained talk all the time. I must admit, she tried my patience! But we were a little excited now that we had a plan and knew what we needed to do. It wasn’t much, but even by the end of that day I thought the outside looked a little tidier, and Katie had made the flower garden look real nice.
    Every once in a while the old Katie would suddenly erupt from out of nowhere.
    “I hate all this work and this dirt and sweat!” she burst out once in the middle of the afternoon.
    Usually I didn’t say anything and she’d calm down and remember that everything was different now, and then slowly start in working again. Or she’d take a look at Emma and then she’d realize that we had a new mama and her little baby to take care of and that was even bigger and more important than just keeping Rosewood functioning.
    It had to be a lot harder for the other two than it was for me. I’d had to work hard all my life. But tragic circumstances had thrown us together, even though we were from two different worlds—maybe even three different worlds—and now we had to learn to survive together. As Katie seemed to recognize the fix we were in, knowing that we had to depend on each other and help each other, she’d seemed to grow up again all of a sudden, like she had when Emma had come and William had been born. She was turning into a grown-up girl who was ready to take charge.
    We were tired by the end of the day. But as we worked and talked, more ideas kept coming to us. Pretty soon I found myself thinking that maybe we could make Katie’s plan work after all.

T HE O LD P AGES
7

    I WAS STILL PRACTICING MY READING AND WAS GETTING better. I was reading more in the McGuffey Readers. Sometimes Katie would read to Emma just to settle her down, especially in the evenings, almost like she was reading to a child. I reckon she was doing just that after all. I don’t think Emma had ever had anyone treat her so kindly as Katie treated her, and before long when she was nursing little William at her breast, she’d ask Katie to read to her, which she always did. I’d never seen anyone as devoted to another human being as Emma was to Katie. And Katie was so loving and patient to her that it just couldn’t help making me respect Katie in a new way. Whatever Katie might have said about herself when I’d first come, about not being as smart as me, I’d never seen anyone with a heart that was able to love as much as her. I think I’d heard somewhere about tragedy making a body more capable of love. I don’t know if that was true, but it sure was with Katie.
    And when Katie and me were alone at