Engines of the Broken World Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t sun, so I guessed it had gotten to be daytime but was still storming outside. Gospel was asleep in the big bed. I climbed out of my own bed and went to look, pushing back the curtains of the window and wiping condensation off the pane. I could see almost nothing but white outside. The snow was still falling at a steady pace, and I guessed there was close on two feet of it piled up. The trees across the garden were bent under the masses that covered them, so that just a few needles stuck out, green and lonely, and some parts of the trunks, which looked like muddy stripes on a clean sheet.
    It was morning, and I didn’t see any better how we were going to bury Mama. Even under the trees there was snow; not as much, maybe, but it had been falling too long and hard for there to be none. And it felt colder, or at least my fingers pressed to the panes were chilled through at once, and my breath made the world outside vanish.
    I didn’t like to think about it, but I was going to have to go into the kitchen. We needed to eat, and that’s where everything was—as much of everything as we still had, of course. Some apples and purple potatoes, strings of onions hung up in the cellar, a wheel of strong cheese that we’d been cutting off of for weeks, pumpkins that we brought in when it looked to start snowing. Preserves of various sorts from spring and summer, whatever I had time to get ready between working on the house and caring for Mama. Two squirrels, skinned and ready to cook, that Gospel had caught in snares. And a loaf of bread that I had just finished baking when Mama started her final agonies, and which, in all the trouble just after, we hadn’t touched at all. Enough for a bit, but all in the kitchen or the cellar beneath, and I did not under Heaven want to walk in there. Nothing for it, though, since obviously Gospel wasn’t going to do the cooking. He barely ate anything but meat nowadays anyway, and that only partly cooked out in the wilds, I gathered.
    No choice but to go. I walked to the door and gave it a shove to open. It was bitter cold in the sitting room, so I grabbed up one of the quilts I had slept in and wrapped myself in it, hurrying out and pushing the door shut behind me. The wood floor was icy on my feet, so that I hopped from one rag rug to another, past the chairs, and all the way to the kitchen doorway, where I stopped.
    She was lying under the table, just where she was supposed to be, her toe jutting up from her sock, nothing at all moved or out of place. Of course she was. Dead people don’t get up and move around, not even if they haven’t been buried by their ungrateful children. I tried not to look at her as I kindled a fire in the stove, one that I would be happy to have lit, because it was fiercely chilly in the kitchen. I considered the trip over to the barn to see if there were eggs, or if by a miracle the goats had got their milk back. I thought that maybe we should bring the chickens and goats over here, because it was frigid cold, and they might die. Or maybe already had. But the snow was deep outside, and I thought I’d wait till Gospel was up and make him do it, because it was a thing he’d probably set to with relish, and not something I was looking forward to. Instead, I’d just make something simple for breakfast, potatoes and onions and toast and cheese, and just water to drink because there wasn’t any milk. Good enough for a chilly morning like this, when I didn’t want to spend much time at the work, and wanted instead to think about what to do with Mama, whom I was drifting around without really seeing.
    After the stove was lit, I opened up the hatch that led down into the cellar, flipping it up against the wall next to the door that led out toward the barn, and headed down into the warmer room below. It was a blessing to have a root cellar, cool in summer and warmer in winter, with the earth insulating it, and I loved the rich smell of the onions hanging in