Swan Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

awake, and that didn’t make a bit of sense! The more I thought about it, the more I remembered how beautiful and happy Mama looked. No more pain. No more sadness. And her holding His hand. I stood up, and I could sing, sure enough, because whatever had been so hard and tight in my throat was gone , and in that one instant, all my bitter-sad turned right into sweet-sad. Just like that .
    “He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose! ”
    After services, Aunt Bett and I went and collected the younger children. As we came back down the long hallway, Aunt Bett stopped a few times to speak to her friends and to whisper in their ears. Her friends looked at me and Molly and Little Ellis, so I knew she’d told them about Mama. Some of the ladies patted my shoulder and some stroked Little Ellis’s head, but no one tried to touch Molly, because she was wearing her storm-cloud face. I guess Molly was a lot like springtime, with beautiful sunshine and singing birds one minute and a terrible, sudden storm the next.
    The ride back to Aunt Bett’s was a quiet one, with our unusually solemn cousins watching us and then turning their eyes away if we looked back at them. So I just held Little Ellis on my lap and watched through the window as our little town went by. The big flour mill and dirt roads that went off through tall grass, the grocery store all closed up because of it being Sunday, and at last, the familiar road and Aunt Bett’s little gray shingle house. The minute we came inside, we could smell the wonderful Easter ham she’d left roasting in the oven, and our cousins chirked up a bit.
    “All you children get in there and change your clothes,” Aunt Bett ordered, putting her purse and gloves on the hall table and heading for the kitchen.
    “Darlene?” she called over her shoulder. “You find some shorts and shirts for Dove and them. You hear? And make sure you come help me get dinner on the table.”
    “Yes’m,” Darlene answered, and she smiled at me.
    “Don’t you just hate being the oldest?” she asked, as we steered the children toward the bedroom.
    “I guess so,” I said, but it wasn’t true. The truth was that I had never even thought of such a thing. So I didn’t really know whether I minded it or not.
    “Believe me,” Darlene said, perhaps sensing my lack of real feelings about being the oldest. “One of these days, you’ll know what I mean. You’ll get tired of wiping their noses and their bottoms and having them around all the time. You’ll want nothing more in this world than to have some private time, just for yourself. And you probably won’t get it, just like I don’t get it.”
    “I won’t?” It still seemed inconceivable to me that I would feel that way about Molly and Little Ellis. To my mind, there were just things to be done, and I was the one to do them.
    “You’ll know what I mean, one of these days,” Darlene assured me, and with that, she led me to Aunt Bett’s famous “Closet,”—more than a closet, because it was lots bigger than any closet I’d ever seen before—big enough to have its own window and with shelves that went almost to the ceiling and that were loaded down with clean, folded clothes of all kinds. And three shiny racks on wheels, all jammed tight with hanging clothes, and a big basket full of matched socks. Aunt Bett had more children’s clothes in that one room than they had down at the department store on Main Street, but I knew for a fact that she hadn’t bought any of them new. The piles of shirts, shorts, and jeans, she had gotten from her friends whose children had outgrown them. And she didn’t pay any money for them either, but traded big jars of her good homemade pickles for them. Most of the hanging clothes—the dresses, at least—were homemade, mostly by Aunt Bett herself, but a few were homemade by those same friends, and she paid lots of jars of pickles for them.
    Darlene lifted some neatly folded shorts and shirts from a shelf and