Engines of the Broken World Read Online Free PDF Page B

know what she could do, but she could do something, I was certain sure. Or something more than a twelve-year-old girl whose mama was singing to her from past death.
    My socks weren’t meant for the cold, the chill that already felt like it was the middle of a hard winter, and they were soaked and soggy within a couple of steps. Then my feet were feeling nothing at all. I knew it wasn’t good, but I hadn’t had the time to fetch boots or even slippers to wear out. No time to do anything but run and try not to scream, though I realized I was praying silently, begging the Dear Lord to save me, to take all of this away and make it like it used to be, even if it meant Mama was still dead. Maybe especially if it meant Mama was still dead.
    The Widow Cally lived just a patch away from us, in a tidy little cottage with a cobblestone chimney that was giving up little trails of smoke, so I knew that she was up and the house would be warm. I could tell her what had happened to Mama, and what was happening now, and have a cup of hot cider maybe, or maybe we’d just hurry back to rescue Gospel. I don’t know what I was thinking, but that was somehow not the first thing I wanted done. I’d lost the quilt along the way, flying off my shoulders as I ran, so it was just me in my housedress and apron and socks, shivering from the cold, who bounded up on the Widow’s porch, where there was barely any snow and her old rocker creaked a little in the cold wind. I pounded on her door, begging her to please, please answer.
    The door swung in and there she was, a tall, lean, walnut brown woman with her head inside a knit cap of awfully bright goats’ wool and a dress that hung loose on her skinny form. She wore boots inside her house, and costume jewels on her fingers that Gospel and I had delighted in finding for her in abandoned houses when we were younger. Her face was almost as smooth as the one that peered out from her wedding pictures, but now it sagged just a little, and under her cap I knew her long hair was gone but for a few thin wisps that she trimmed with pinking shears. She looked down on me with her brows knit and free hand planted on her hip, and then she reached out and pulled me into the warm of the inside without so much as a word. Esmeralda Cally was her name, but in spite of that she was practical down to her jeweled fingertips, and no way was she going to have a girl shivering on her porch while passing the time of day.
    “Child, what in Heaven’s name are you doing out on my porch on a frosty morning like this? Is your mother gone badly? Should I come over to help sit up with her?” Because Mama, so far as the Widow Cally knew, was only and always still sick—with her spells and fits and muttered threats, and not dead—if you could call her that.
    “Miz Cally, she’s not sick any longer, no she’s not,” I gasped out through chattering teeth while the old lady gathered up an afghan that sat over her padded chair and draped it around me.
    “Oh, my dear girl.” She said that and nothing more, and then she took me in her skinny old arms and pulled me in tight. I could smell faded flowers on her; I knew she stored her clothes with them in a big chest that came from far away and was carved with animals and roses and vines. It was what a mother should smell like, and all at once I started to weep as I hadn’t yet, except for right when Mama died, and then only just a little because Gospel told me not to be a baby. But here I cried and I cried, and I tried to tell what was making me scared and what I thought I had seen, but mostly I just snuffled and sniffled and wailed, and the Widow held me close and swayed a little side to side.
    She drew me away from the door after a few minutes of this behavior, and we settled onto a sofa that didn’t get much use except for company, not since her son had passed away two years gone. She pushed me back a bit, with some struggle, I’ll admit, because I didn’t like to let her