All God's Dangers Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaves on it and them leaves has got stickers all around em. And they told my daddy to get him a holly-hoke, tear a twig off bout two foot long—had them old sticker leaves on it—and whip her feet. She stood it; it hurt plenty, I reckon, but she stood it. And he’d squat down by her or sit down in a chair and whip her feet, whip em light, just enough for them old stickers on them leaves to prick her skin. And good God, the water would run out of her feet into little pools on the floor, and he’d put cloths down to catch the water. He’d sit there and whip her feet—that didn’t do her no good under God’s sun. And the doctor my daddy had come in to see her, white man by the name of Seth Ames—we chaps always called him Dr. Ames—he couldn’t do her no good.
    She died in August. They buried her over here at Elam Baptist Church. All right. My daddy was one of these kind—just tell the straight truth like it was—he liked other women while he kept him a wife. And when she died in August he got in a plumb hurry to marry again, and three weeks to Christmas that same year he was married again.
    My mother was the mother for six children and before she died she lost two of em to my knowin. And that left her when she left this world, that left four children—my sister Sadie, my brother Peter, my brother Henry, and myself. Henry was the next child born after me, I was the oldest boy. My sister Sadie was older than I was and Peter was the baby of us all.
    Henry died one year to the month after my mother died. My daddy didn’t seem to grieve over my mother—of course, I was quite young and I couldn’t estimate him then like I could when I got older, but I know he was right off huntin him another woman and went and married TJ’s mother. And when Henry died the next August there was a grief among we children but my daddy and his new wife didn’t take it hard at all, not a bit, nobody did but we children. The child, Henry, he seemed to grow considerably while he was sick. He stretched out and got tall and he would tell my daddy a heap of times, “Papa, I hear a roarin. There’s somethin roarin in my head.”
    Don’t know whether it was his imagination or it was true facts but that’s what he said. “There’s a roarin in my head. Roar like a train comin. Papa, don’t you hear it?”
    My daddy’d be sittin or standin by his bed. Said, “No, son, I don’t hear it.”
    Henry said, “Hold your head down here close to me—” He didn’t realize that my daddy couldn’t hear nothin through him. Just said, “Well, there’s somethin roarin in my head.”
    And my daddy had Dr. Seth Ames to treat Henry. He was a nice, kind man, but as far as his practiceship, I don’t know whether he was on the dot or not. He told my daddy, “Hayes, I just can’t locate his complaint, I just can’t do it. It seems to me like it’s a case of the St. Vitus Dance. It seems like the boy’s worried with the St. Vitus Dance.”
    Henry didn’t live long after the doctor seed him; he went on away from here. And a year to the month after my mother died, we carried him to Elam Baptist Church over there by Apafalya and buried him. Well, my sister lived—that didn’t leave but three of us then, me, my sister Sadie, and Peter. Sadie was three years older than I was and she lived to marry and her and her husband had three little boy children. He died and she married again, then she died. She didn’t live long after she married the second time. Well, that didn’t leave but two of us, me and Peter. No whole sister in the world.
    A FTER my mother died, my daddy married TJ’s mother. She was a Reed, Maggie Reed. And my daddy loved women, O God, he loved women. Old man Jubal Reed’s daughter and old lady Adeline—used to be Adeline Milliken and after old man Jubal Reed married