All God's Dangers Read Online Free PDF

my mother practically done all the field work. My mother especially done anything my daddy told her to do as far as cultivatin a crop out there—I seed her do it—that a man ought to done. She’d plow, she’d hoe; my daddy’d tell her, “Take that plow!” “Hoe!” And here’s the way I seed her go many a day, and that was a every year’s job for her. My daddy’d have his gun on his shoulder and be off on Sitimachas Creek swamps, huntin. And her and her little brothers would be in the field at work. She’d be out there with her dress rolled up nearly to her knees, just so she could have a clear stroke walkin. Pushed up and rolled up around her waist and a string tied around it and her dress would bunch up around her hips. She’d be in the field workin like a man, my daddy out in the woods somewhere huntin. Them boys would be plowin; if they was caught up with the plowin all three of em—my mother and her brothers—would be usin a hoe. My mother had to boss-instruct, she had to be a teacher to them boys, weren’t nobody else there to teach em but her. She taught em how to plow, chop, work that crop every way—she raised em up in it. She was just a over-all leader for her two brothers. And when she taken down sick they was young men size but they were yet there. And they feared my daddy just like I had to fear him when I come along.They called him Buddy and he was their brother-in-law. Uncle Sherman Culver and Uncle John Culver, my mother and daddy raised em right in the house with us. And when they got old enough to stand up and have man thoughts, they left.
    I was nine years old when my mother died; I was too little to remember the date of the month but she died in August and I just lackin from the date she died up until the twenty-eighth day of December of bein nine years old. If I had a twenty-dollar bill this mornin for every time I seed my daddy beat up my mother and beat up my stepmother I wouldn’t be settin here this mornin because I’d have up in the hundreds of dollars. Each one of them women—I didn’t see no cause for it. I don’t expect it ever come in my daddy’s mind what his children thought about it or how they would remember him for it, but that was a poor example, to stamp and beat up children’s mothers right before em.
    I got wagon lines in my shed now, two-horse wagon lines; I used to drive my wagon with leather lines to hold them mules. The outside line catches one mule, outside her mouth to her bits; the other line catches the outside of the other mule’s mouth—all them lines to them mules’ mouths and a line from the one mule’s mouth comes over and catches to the inside of the other mule’s mouth and just so on. You pull on either one of them lines and you pull both mules thataway. Leather lines, the kind of lines my daddy kept up on a low loft in a old log barn. When he’d get unreasonably mad he’d jump up there and grab them lines out and double em up, or grab an old bull whip, had a staff bout a foot long, and he’d take up them lines or that bull whip and whip my mother down. He beat her scandalous. Jump up he would and grab the lines out of the loft, if them was the lines he wanted to whip her with; he’d double em twice, stand up before my mother’s face and just strop her down.
    She died with the dropsy. Swelled up all over her body; her feet and legs swelled to bust for several weeks before she died. She would just sit there in a rockin chair and her feet and legs swelled so bad until they shined. Well, the country wasn’t full of doctors at that time but there was doctors and my daddy had a doctor to her. But he couldn’t cure her. People come there givin advice and visitin, sittin with her, and they told my daddy to get some of these—there’s a old bush and it gets to be a pretty good-sized tree, and it’scalled a holly-hoke. Has