The Coffin Quilt Read Online Free PDF Page B

the corner was Ma's wood range that she always kept blackened just right, the one with the warming closets on top that I miss so now. Adelaide and I had a stool we'd use to reach them. Anytime of the day you could reach in there and get biscuits and they were always warm. And there'd be a pot of soup boiling on the new of the moon. Because that's when it jelled best.
    Over the kitchen was a hanging whale-oil lamp, given to Ma by her father when she wed. Ma didn't trust it, purty as it was with flowers painted on it. She'd rather burn candles. Said that oil lamp would burn just right when we were alone, but as soon as the preacher or somebody important came to call it would smoke and the oil would run over. Ma said there was no end to the
wickedness that lamp would do to embarrass her. I wondered if it didn't have to do with the fact that her father never wanted her to wed Pa in the first place.
    So we used candles. Some families in town had kerosene. But Ma said it was the Devil's own decoction, that people who used it had a covenant with him. Downstairs, too, we had the parlor where the spinning wheel and a loom sat. There were the horns from the first deer my brother Bud shot, an old piano somebody gave Pa when he saved a man's horse from dying, stuffed thatched rockers, a picture of Pa in his uniform from the war, our family Bible, and a shelf of books:
Pilgrim's Progress, Notes on the State of Virginia, Tristram Shandy, The Deerslayer, The Scarlet Letter,
and
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
    You may think they were high-toned for people plain as us. Unless you knew that they were loaned to my brother Calvin by Mr. Ambrose Cuzlin. Calvin was eighteen then, but he still attended our school when he could. It only goes to eighth grade, but Mr. Cuzlin let him keep coming because he said Calvin had a mournful need to learn. Only a month before that election day Calvin gave a speech on good government at the Fourth of July celebration. Pa said Mr. Cuzlin was giving Calvin notions, but as long as he did his chores Pa let him go.
    Upstairs were our bedrooms—four. Ma and Pa had the second to biggest with an old rope bed that Pa had put slats in, a washstand and a clock, and rag rugs on the floor. Nice curtains, too—calico.
    Down the hall was the biggest room. The boys' room, where Bill, Bud, Pharmer, and Calvin slept. Four
beds, solid oak with the headboards decorated with birds and animals burned in by my brother Floyd, four washbasins where they shaved their faces every morning. Where Bill tried to shave every morning, even though he only had fuzz, at fourteen.
    The room for Trinvilla, Adelaide, and Alifair was across from mine and Ro's. We took the smaller room so we could be together.
    In front of our house there was an early spring garden. Pa said they used to call 'em kitchen gardens. It was just where the porch ended and it got the morning sun. The smokehouse was in back and so were the bigger gardens. That's where the pole beans were, where Pa and the boys grew cabbages, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, squash, onions, corn, and beets. The barn was up the incline behind the house. And there was a little house a bit aways from ours. That's where Faithful Black Mookie once lived. Tolbert told me that Faithful Black Mookie was a slave Ma and Pa had before the war. But he was misnamed, because he ran away while Pa was off fighting. James, Tolbert, Floyd, and Sam remember him. We used that little house for storage, and every so often, if Ma sent me in to fetch something, I could feel the haint of Faithful Black Mookie there. Like he never left.
    His old quilt was still in the corner, ragged and damp. So was his shirt, on a peg on the wall. Why did he leave without his shin? I wonder. But think! Us with a slave! And some of my brothers old enough to recollect him!
    The well was out back, behind the kitchen, and it was a hundred feet deep. Every once in a while me and Bill would pull the big piece of slate off it and peer