Take the Cannoli

Take the Cannoli Read Online Free PDF

Book: Take the Cannoli Read Online Free PDF
Author: Sarah Vowell
near-death trips I’d taken with my own pet, Stockings. My dad had given me a Tennessee walking horse—but not a saddle. And so I rode bareback, clutching Stockings’s mane, praying that shewouldn’t get spooked, though she always did, tearing off into the woods, breathing fire. By the time she stopped, after thirty-nine thousand repetitions of the command “Whoa!”, the hickory branches would have etched my skin into a bloody gingham. If one of the four horses of the Apocalypse had to be put down, Stockings was ready to ride.
    I could buy the gaudy deaths and grisly details set forth in Revelation because Oklahoma itself was a biblical landscape. We must have been on tornado watch half the year. And the place was literally crawling with snakes—snakes in my treehouse, snakes on the porch, snakes in the yard, snakes on Rainbow Mountain, which my mom found out the hard way used to be named Snake Mountain after one of its copperheads put her in the hospital. Because I was baptized when I was eight in a water moccasin–infested lake, and, as if I wasn’t petrified enough (fangs and drowning being two of my bigger fears), Sister Minnie’s drunken husband drove up to the water’s edge in his pickup right after I came up for air and he started scream-singing the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River.” Because our cousin Gary John’s wife got shot dead in the head with Gary’s own gun by Gary’s sister’s husband, who was joking around and didn’t know the gun was loaded, ha-ha. Because the leader of my Brownie troop was smashed into a million pieces trying to cross the train tracks. Because my grandfather Pa Vowell buried another wife every few years. Because my other grandfather Pa Parson was a Cherokee wart doctor who could tie a string around a wart and bury the string in the ground and that made the wart go away. Because my grandmother Ma Parson lost her mind one dayand couldn’t remember my name though she could remember all the words to “Bringing In the Sheaves” and today we call this Alzheimer’s but back then we called it “God’s will.” Because on Wednesday nights my mother would drive this ancient witchy widow to church—a lady who believed haircuts for women were a sin, which did stop her from trimming that mangy white rope dangling off her scalp around 1923 but did not stop her from scamming rides off my mom (a former hairdresser); my sister and I dreaded the moment the woman climbed into the car because she’d give us the evil eye and tell us that our perky, little-girl pixie cuts were some kind of fatal flaw we’d go to hell for.
    So in such a superstitious town among such accident-prone citizens, Revelation seemed more like a gossip sheet than a ghost story. In fact, considering all the random wrath of God around me, Armageddon appeared refreshingly well thought-out. And that was its attraction to everyone at church. We gathered together to reassure one another that no matter what horrible thing just happened, no matter whose daughter just got scraped off the train tracks, whose mother was in the hospital with fang marks perforating her leg, God had a plan. A cruel, kooky, murderous horror movie of a plan for sure, but a plan nonetheless.
    That’s what even the gloomiest sermons were about—the future. And that’s why in the gospel hymns we sang, “will” was the most popular verb—“I will meet you in the morning,” “There will be peace in the valley someday,” and my favorite, “I’ll fly away.” Even now, a quarter of a century after I learned those songs, they’re still stuck in myhead. I miss singing them. I miss the harmony. Some Sunday mornings, in the middle of secular superstitious rituals like reading The New York Times Magazine or watching that berserk Sam Donaldson on TV, I’ll hum “I’ll fly away” as I make coffee,
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

Undeclared

Jen Frederick

Final Cut

Lin Anderson

Mouse and Dragon

Steve Miller, Sharon Lee

Tragic

Robert K. Tanenbaum

The Danger of Being Me

Anthony J Fuchs