Sula Read Online Free PDF

lay. The old woman had died without seeing or blessing her granddaughter.
    No one other than Mr. Martin seemed to be in the house, but a sweet odor as of gardenias told them that someone else had been. Blotting her lashes with a white handkerchief, Helene walked through the kitchen to the back bedroom where she had slept for sixteen years. Nel trotted along behind, enchanted with the smell, the candles and the strangeness. When Helene bent to loosen the ribbons of Nel’s hat, a woman in a yellow dress came out of the garden and onto the back porch that opened into the bedroom. The two women looked at each other. There was no recognition in the eyes of either. Then Helene said, “This is your…grandmother, Nel.” Nel looked at her mother and then quickly back at the door they had just come out of.
    “No. That was your great-grandmother. This is your grandmother. My…mother.”
    Before the child could think, her words were hanging in the gardenia air. “But she looks so young.”
    The woman in the canary-yellow dress laughed and said she was forty-eight, “an old forty-eight.”
    Then it was she who carried the gardenia smell. This tiny woman with the softness and glare of a canary. In that somber house that held four Virgin Marys, where death sighed in every corner and candles sputtered, the gardenia smell and canary-yellow dress emphasized the funeral atmosphere surrounding them.
    The woman smiled, glanced in the mirror and said, throwing her voice toward Helene, “That your only one?”
    “Yes,” said Helene.
    “Pretty. A lot like you.”
    “Yes. Well. She’s ten now.”
    “Ten? Vrai? Small for her age, no?”
    Helene shrugged and looked at her daughter’s questioning eyes. The woman in the yellow dress leaned forward. “Come. Come, chere.”
    Helene interrupted. “We have to get cleaned up. We been three days on the train with no chance to wash or…”
    “Comment t’appelle?”
    “She doesn’t talk Creole.”
    “Then you ask her.”
    “She wants to know your name, honey.”
    With her head pressed into her mother’s heavy brown dress, Nel told her and then asked, “What’s yours?”
    “Mine’s Rochelle. Well. I must be going on.” She moved closer to the mirror and stood there sweeping hair up from her neck back into its halo-like roll, and wetting with spit the ringlets that fell over her ears. “I been here, you know, most of the day. She pass on yesterday. The funeral tomorrow. Henri takin’ care.” She struck a match, blew it out and darkened her eyebrows with the burnt head. All the while Helene and Nel watched her. The one in a rage at the folded leaves she had endured, the wooden benches she had slept on, all to miss seeing her grandmother and seeing instead that painted canary who never said a word of greeting or affection or…
    Rochelle continued. “I don’t know what happen to de house. Long time paid for. You be thinkin’ on it? Oui?” Her newly darkened eyebrows queried Helene.
    “Oui.” Helene’s voice was chilly. “I be thinkin’ on it.”
    “Oh, well. Not for me to say…”
    Suddenly she swept around and hugged Nel—a quick embrace tighter and harder than one would have imagined her thin soft arms capable of.
    “’Voir! ’Voir!” and she was gone.
    In the kitchen, being soaped head to toe by her mother, Nel ventured an observation. “She smelled so nice. And her skin was so soft.”
    Helene rinsed the cloth. “Much handled things are always soft.”
    “What does ‘vwah’ mean?”
    “I don’t know,” her mother said. “I don’t talk Creole.” She gazed at her daughter’s wet buttocks. “And neither do you.”
             
    When they got back to Medallion and into the quiet house they saw the note exactly where they had left it and the ham dried out in the icebox.
    “Lord, I’ve never been so glad to see this place. But look at the dust. Get the rags, Nel. Oh, never mind. Let’s breathe awhile first. Lord, I never thought I’d get back