Chasing Redbird Read Online Free PDF

inside. She was a bit big for the drawer. Uncle Nate sat on the edge of the bed pleading with his Redbird to get out of that drawer, but it was as if she couldn’t hear him, as if she’d already started on her journey.
    I knew what that drawer meant, and I was scared to heaven and back. “Please,” I begged her. “Please—”
    But she kept mumbling about the hand of God and calling me Rose-baby, Rose-baby , and my mother snatched me away and took me back to our side of the house.
    In the middle of the night, according to my father, Aunt Jessie sat straight up and shouted, “I hope it’s a miracle I’m about to see!” and then she lay back and closed her eyes, and she was dead.

CHAPTER 10

T HE M ISSION
    E verybody was torn up about Aunt Jessie, but I think Uncle Nate and I took it the hardest. They let me see her the next morning. They’d taken her out of the drawer and put her on the bed. Uncle Nate was kneeling beside her, saying “Redbird, Redbird,” over and over. I wanted to jump on the bed and pull her up, but she was lying so still, just like Rose, and her hand looked just like Rose’s, and it made me crazy. I had to get out of there. I had to get outside where there was air.
    Later that day, I was alone in my room (Zinnia Taylor: agent of doom) when Uncle Nate came in, carrying a stick.
    â€œWhere is it?” he demanded.
    â€œWhere’s what?”
    â€œThat creature—” He thrashed his stick around the room, poking under the bed and dresser.
    â€œIn the closet,” I said.
    â€œGet it.”
    I pulled out the coffee can.
    â€œOpen it,” he said. “Now pick it up by its tail. Now snap it like this—” He whipped his wrist in the air.
    I did as he directed, holding the snake by the tail and whipping it in the air. There was one sharp snap, and then the snake hung lifeless. I dropped it and it lay still on the floor. “What’d I do?”
    â€œKilled it,” he said. Then he stood over it and thrashed the already dead snake with his stick, over and over and over. He was like a wild man, and I’d never in my life seen him like that. Usually he was the quietest, gentlest man you ever did see.
    No one knew about the snake except me and Uncle Nate. I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want anyone to know I’d killed Aunt Jessie. The doctor blamed her diabetes; he said her sugar was way out of sight. But I didn’t believe it. How could anything so good as sugar kill a person?
    For weeks, I hardly said a word to anyone. People buzzed around me like flies on a honey jar, knowing how close I’d been to Aunt Jessie, but their attention only made me feel worse. It kept reminding me of what I’d done and that I was Zinnia Taylor: killer . I had terrible, terrible nightmares in which people were chasing me through tall, stiff trees, and the farther I ran, the narrower were the spaces between the trees, so that I’d be squeezing myself through. I was afraid I’d get stuck and not be able to move and it would be then that the snakes would come and get me.
    At home, I’d skulk around, trying not to be noticed, and yet hoping, wishing, praying to be noticed.
    And Uncle Nate? In some ways he seemed the same: He’d putter around the house and yard, he’d sit on the porch, he’d talk in his same, quiet voice to us kids. And sometimes, even, he’d talk to me, just as he used to. “Look here, pumpkin—look at this-here rock I found,” he’d say.
    But there were other times when he’d look at me and not seem to know who I was, and there were times he called me Rose, and as soon as he said that name, he’d stop and turn around and stare, as if someone else—Rose? Aunt Jessie?—were standing right beside me. And there were his bouts of grumpiness, when he seemed impatient with the world, and there were his chases, too, when off he’d go,