The Day of Small Things Read Online Free PDF

can’t make myself say nothing for the lights and the sounds are coming on fast. Lilah Bel has the apple in one hand and the hatpin in the other and the lights are sparking off the cruel sharp hatpin as it comes down at the baby’s little head and the hatpin is going in and in and in and the mama is laughing and crying at the same time and the humming and the little drums and the lines of light are everywhere and
    The cold water is in my face and some gets up my nose. I sneeze and I hear Lilah Bel hollering, “Wake up! Please, Least, you got to wake up!”
    I blink my eyes and there she is, standing over me with the dipper gourd from the springhouse in her hand. She is breathing hard and I know she must have clambered down from the barn loft and run all the way to the spring to get that water. Her face is nigh as wet as mine with the tears that are running down her cheeks.
    I set up and wipe my face on my skirt. “I’m all right—that was just one of my spells. Law, you like to drownded me.”
    She is still bawling as she drops down on the quilts beside me and hugs me hard. “I’m sorry, Least. I didn’t mean to …”
    I hug her back. “I reckon you’ll not need me to tell you no scary story now—I done scared you already. But I will tell you one thing and it’s a secret—Brother’s got him a girl and he ain’t telling Mama for fear of what she’ll do.”

    Article from the “Church News” column in the Ransom newspaper (no date)
    MANY ANGELS: THE TALE OF A MOTHER’S UNDYING LOVE
    Half hidden in the hemlocks, the little family cemetery lies at the end of a winding path trodden smooth by the daily passage of her feet. In sunshine and in rain, midst winter’s snows or ’neath Old Sol’s blazing summer heat, the faithful little mother keeps her vigil.
    Of respect for her privacy and her sorrow, we shall not name this one who has suffered such loss, but that name is surely graven in letters of purest gold on the pages of the Celestial Record.
    Nay, call her “Trueheart,” she who tends the six little graves, bringing such rustic posies as the season affords or shaping green wreaths of box when the time of blossoming is o’er.
    In a pitiless procession, one after another these sweet babes have been ushered to their final resting places—some after only a few brief days of life.
    But Trueheart keeps her watch, as mindful of these little ones sleeping ’neath the clay as any mother with a nursery filled with living babes. One by one she names them for us—these infants who will never grow old—and recalls for us their tiny faces, each precious and unique in her maternal memory.
    How few could suffer as Trueheart has suffered, yet hold firm to a trust (cont. on p. 5)

Chapter 6
Brother’s Girl
Dark Holler, 1931
    (Least)
    I met her a while back of this, Mama, at a ball game in Dewell Hill. She’s a beauty operator at Clara’s Beauty Shoppe in Ransom and she boards at Miz Jarrett’s place on Hill Street.”
    I am on the back porch shucking the roasting ears and Mama and Brother are in the kitchen. I don’t know why Brother has decided to tell Mama about this girl after keeping her a secret for so long. Whatever the reason is, I bet he wishes he had kept his big mouth shut, for Mama don’t like it, not one little bit, and she is bowing up something fierce.
    “A beauty operator! Lives in a boardinghouse!” Mama spits out the words like they taste bad in her mouth. “Might as well say a whore-woman from that wicked place acrost the river—and you aim to
marry
her? What kind of use is a woman like that on a farm? Who are her people? Why don’t she live at home with them, like a respectable somebody?”
    “Her mama’s dead and her daddy’s on the SouthernRailroad.” Brother is talking slow and careful now, the way he does when he’s trying to bring Mama around to his way of thinking. “She grew up in Hot Springs but went in to Asheville to learn her trade. She’s—”
    Mama snorts like a