Filter House Read Online Free PDF

with a hood, and her hands were holding themselves out as if she had just let go of something, a bird or a kiss.
    The Blue Lady.
    So some grown-ups did know.
    Downstairs, the screen door banged. Oneida shut the heart. She shouldn’t be snooping in Big Mama’s bedroom. What if she were caught?
    The chair she was supposed to be bringing was back by where she’d come in. She’d walked right past it.
    The kitchen was crowded with noisy kids. Ivy Joe had hit a home run playing baseball with the boys. Luemma had learned a new dance called the Monkey. Oneida helped Limoges roll her pants legs down and made Royal wash his hands. No one asked what had taken her so long upstairs.
    Mom and Dad left right after dinner. Oneida promised to behave herself. She did, too. She only went in Big Mama’s bedroom with permission.
    Five times that first Friday, Big Mama sent Oneida up to get something for her.
    Oneida managed not to touch anything. She stood again and again, though, in front of the two tables, cataloguing their contents. On the right, alongside the portrait of the Blue Lady were several tall glass flasks filled with colored fluids; looping strands of pearls wound around their slender necks. A gold-rimmed saucer held a dark, mysterious liquid, with a pile of what seemed to be pollen at the center of its glossy surface.
    A red-handled axe rested on the other table. It had two sharp, shiny edges. No wonder none of the other kids could come in here.
    On every trip, Oneida spotted something else. She wondered how long it would take to see everything.
    On the fifth trip, Oneida turned away from the huge white wing leaning against the table’s front legs (how had she missed that the first four times?) to find Big Mama watching her from the doorway.
    “I—I didn’t—”
    “You ain’t messed with none a my stuff, or I’d a known it. S’all right; I spected you’d be checkin out my altars, chile. Why I sent you up here.”
    Altars? Like in a Catholic church like Aunt Elise went to? The two tables had no crucifixes, no tall lecterns for a priest to pray from, but evidently they were altars, because there was nothing else in the room that Big Mama could be talking about. It was all normal stuff, except for the flower bunches dangling down from the ceiling.
    “Then I foun these.” Big Mama held out one hand as she moved into the bedroom and shut the door behind herself. “Why you treat em so careless-like? Leavin em in your dirty pajamas pocket! What if I’d a had Luemma or Ivy Joe washin clothes?”
    The seeds. Oneida accepted them again. They were dry, now, and slightly sticky.
    “Them girls don’t know no more about mojo than Albert Einstein. Less, maybe.”
    Was mojo magic? The seeds might be magic, but Oneida had no idea what they were for or how to use them. Maybe Big Mama did. Oneida peeped up at her face as if the answer would appear there.
    “I see. You neither. That niece a mine taught you nothin. Ain’t that a surprise.” Her tone of voice indicated just the opposite.
    Big Mama’s niece was Oneida’s mother.
    “Go down on the back porch and make sure the rinse cycle startin all right. Get us somethin to drink. Then come up here again, and we do us a bit a discussin.”
    When Oneida returned she carried a pitcher of iced tea with lemon, a bowl of sugar, and two glasses on a tray. She balanced the tray on her hip so she could knock and almost dropped it. Almost.
    It took Big Mama a moment to let her in. “Leave that on the chair seat,” she said when she saw the tray. “Come over nex the bed.”
    A little round basket with a lid and no handles sat on the white chenille spread. A fresh scent rose from its tight coils. “Sea grass,” said Big Mama in answer to Oneida’s question. “Wove by my gramma. That ain’t what I want you to pay attention to, though. What’s inside—”
    Was a necklace. Made of watermelon seeds.
    “A’int everybody has this in they backgroun. Why I was sure your mama musta said