Kathy Little Bird Read Online Free PDF

didn’t pay hardly anything. Then I helped out in the drugstore when Mr. Stalling’s wife was sick. But she got better….”
    “I don’t want to hear your biography. Just tell me the dollar amount.”
    “Thirty-five bucks.”
    “Oh, Abram.” His words were confirmation of my fears. “That’s nothing. We could eat maybe for three days, but what about sleeping? We’d have to hide in barns and be on the lookout for dogs.” I jumped up, wrapped the gun in the pieces of flannel it was kept in, and hid it in the bowl of the old oak so I wouldn’t have to bother with it for a while.
    We started to walk, past farmland, through fields, into woods where the sun filtering through branches created patterns of light.
    “I’m sorry, Kathy.”
    I saw that he was. I saw that he had disappointed himself too.
    “I haven’t been able to put anything by either.” We walked on in silence. “I can’t go anyway,” I said suddenly.
    He stopped where he was. “But—”
    “I know. It was never practical. It was a dream, a Cree dream, and we believed it for a while.”
    Abram thrust out his chin, the way he did when he was determined. “I can make it happen.”
    “I don’t think so. It’s Mum. She isn’t well.”
    “I’m glad you told me. I’ll pray for her.”
    I squeezed his hand. Abram would pray for her with a wonderful purity of purpose, but it wouldn’t do away with the small, hard kernel of fear in me.

    W INTER came and deepened. Snow piled into drifts and on sunny days there was the sound of icicles dripping from the eaves and porch rails. I took on more and more of Mum’s tasks. Mum
now
and my memory of Mum didn’t blend easily. When I looked at her I saw her as she had been, always moving, doing things that nobody noticed or thanked her for, but that made the house run. The house itself had the clean smell of soap when she was in charge of things. Now that it was up to me I began to see what she had done, and to wonder how she found time to teach us into the bargain. While Jason, Morrie, and I did sums and essays, she supervised with mending in her lap, or her hands might be busy canning, pickling, and preserving.
    I knew this was not going to be my life. Yet I only remember Mum as happy.
    “Not happy,” she would correct me, “joyful.”
    Joyful was her Cree name. And she lived up to it. Shelaughed, made little jokes, told stories, all the while keeping an eye on us. Then one by one she gave up things that only months ago she had done without effort.
    To escape thinking about it, I took to singing everyone. Mum was a slender, crisp melody, with little runs for the joy she put into things. Jason was a boisterous refrain, light and good-hearted. Morrie of course was a hop, skip, and a jump up and down the scale. And Jellet a lot of bombast.
    It was Abram I had trouble with. I did him as a kind of gospel hymn, but that was only part of Abram. Anyway, it got me through the winter. I also tried slipping into the old dreams about my Austrian father. When I was little I’d imagined him as living in a castle on top of a hill, with hunting dogs at his feet. He’d come for me of course, and the castle would belong to me then, and the dogs. As I grew older that dream faded from its unlikeliness.
    Spring went by too fast and summer was brief, as it always is here. I’d counted on warm days to get Mum well. They were here but didn’t seem to help. I was as housebound as in the winter with the Sargasso Sea closing about me. It was almost impossible for me to get away, because if I didn’t do the chores, Mum would. So I stayed close, only seeing Abram once or twice. We laughed about the plans we’d had and said what children we had been. I think he felt shy with me, and for some reason I did with him.
    I hated to see fall come that year. I had no dreams to pull around me, and I was afraid of another long white silence. Cabin fever, Mum called it. But it was on account of her that Idreaded it. She slept a lot