Tending to Grace Read Online Free PDF

She ignores the dirt and walks into her room and tosses the moccasins on her bed.
    She hasn’t touched the mouse droppings, so I take everything out of the cupboards, including old tins of spices with chipped paint hanging off their faces. I sweep out the cupboards, and then I sprinkle an entire can of tub cleaner inside and scrub the wood until it bleaches to a soft buff.
    I find mousetraps in the only closet in the house—a little sliver of a thing beside the back door—and I load them with peanut butter and set them behind the plates.
    â€œWhat you doin’ with that there rat trap?” Agatha asks, walking out of her room. “You’ll have guts all over the place if you use that. It’ll take a mouse head off faster than an ax whacks a chicken. That’s for the rats that get into the grain in the barn. What you doin’ in that closet, anyway?”
    â€œI was cleaning it s-s-s-so I could p-p-p-put the big soup pot in there. I f-found these.”
    â€œWell, top of the stove works just as well for the soup pot. I don’t put nothing in that closet ’cept for traps and tools. That crack that’s in the back of it goes clear to the outdoors. You can see the stars at night from in there if you look up. It’s kind of fun. You should try it sometime.”
    She pulls a sugar cube from her pocket and munches it slowly. She no longer offers them to me.
    â€œYou gotta get used to livin’ in a house like this, Cornelia. Why don’t you stop wastin’ your time and come help me in the garden?”
    â€œIf I’m going to l-l-l-live here, I’ve got to clean it up. How can you live like this?”
    She chuckles.“Don’t look at it. That works pretty good,” she says, walking back outside.
    I kick a chair when she leaves. Then I make my way down to the basement. Dozens of jars of home-canned food cover one sloping shelf, but I can’t tell what’s inside until I wipe the dust with my shirt. Old stringy pickles float in some of the jars, carrots or something orange fills others, and some are stuffed with something that could be beets. Green goo fills a couple dozen jars on the shelf above. I toss them all into old bushel baskets and carry them out to the barn.

32
    Bertha is loaded with a fifty-pound bag of oatmeal, a twenty-five-pound bag of whole wheat flour, and another of brown rice. We tuck tofu between us on the front seat, lentils on the floor, and dry milk powder in the crawl space behind our seats. Agatha fit right in at the health-food store; I was the only one not wearing moccasins.
    â€œDon’t you eat any meat at all?”
    â€œNot for a long while,” she says, loading a bag of carob chips. “Doesn’t make much sense to me, stuffing myself with dead animals.”
    The store is in Dover, two towns away, and as we drive back to Agatha’s, we pass a bank, a bookstore, a whole string of little shops selling ice cream and antiques and doughnuts.
    â€œC-c-c-can you get me a c-c-coffee?”
    â€œNah,” Agatha says, pulling a thermos from under the seat. “I brought the sassafras.”

33
    We drive in the slow lane, like we do everything else. As we head off the highway and into Harrisville, Agatha pulls Bertha over to the side of the road. Two wicker chairs sit near a mailbox with a FREE sign hooked to their backs.
    â€œWell, I can see those out by the barn, can’t you?”
    No, I can’t, I think as she stops. They are the same tomato green as the truck and are covered with mud. “They don’t even stand up right.”
    Agatha doesn’t listen. She climbs onto the back of the truck and pushes the oatmeal out of the way. “Are you going to help me or not?”
    As we get the second chair onto the truck, a pickup rumbles to a stop. “Agatha!” A man jumps out and hurries toward us. My aunt plants her feet into the gravel.
    â€œYou ladies need a