The Stones Cry Out Read Online Free PDF

Richmond's far outer edge, and when the urge to commemorate the war was just beginning. But other Civil War memorials soon appeared on the road -- J. E. B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis -- and before long the cobblestone street was renamed Monument Avenue. In the antebellum aftermath, it became the city’s most exclusive address.
    These days it was my mother who lived in the big house along with our boarder, a photographer named Wally Marsh. I lived in the carriage house across the slate courtyard but spent as much time as possible in the main house. But this evening the house was empty. In the fridge, I found a pitcher of cold lemonade and carried it out to the courtyard. Sitting at the wrought iron table, I could just barely see Lee's profile through the magnolia leaves. The trees hadn't been cut back in four years. Not since my father died.
    Sipping my drink, I closed my eyes and listened to the evening traffic. It thrummed softly over the cobblestones, a meditative rhythm like a hummed chant, and my mind began to drift over the day, returning to that conversation with the mayor.
    Was it possible for six hundred people to miss two men falling off a roof?
    Possible, I decided.
    But not probable.
    Most likely, LuLu Mendant had it right. An antique wound plagued this city, an inherited devastation, and it visited generations who never saw combat, who never lived as slaves, yet claimed those injuries as their own. The wound was old, the mayor said. And the pain was still fresh.
    When I opened my eyes, my mother was standing on the steps outside the kitchen’s French doors.
    "Raleigh Ann," she said, "be sure to drink up that lemonade."
    Nadine Shaw Harmon's brunette hair spiraled from her pretty head. Walking toward the patio table, she made music. Silver bangles singing and three-inch stilettos clicking across the slate. Her dog walked behind her, a faithful canine whose full name was Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. The name was plucked from thin air. My mother did that with words. Often.
    Madame trotted to my chair, panting, then crawled under the table. The slate was slightly cool from the shade of the house.
    "What's in the lemonade?" I asked.
    My mother only smiled.
    "Didn’t Wally make the lemonade?" I asked. That was the only reason I decided to drink it. "Then please tell me what's in it. In case some weird side effect hits me."
    "I added a little valerian. That's all."
    "Valerian. What does that do?"
    "It's an herb."
    "An herb. What does it do?"
    "It helps you sleep."
    "You mean it's going to knock me out."
    "Raleigh, your bedroom light was on all night. You are ruining your circadian rhythms. You need to sleep."
    I took a deep breath. The air smelled of warm stone and dusk and summer green. I let the sigh out slowly, and smiled. "Have you been at the camp?"
    She clapped her hands. The bracelets chimed. "There was a woman with the worst skin disease you ever did see. Like Job's affliction! But the Lord is going to heal her soon. By His stripes, we are healed."
    After my father died, my mother attached herself to a Pentecostal church twenty miles north of town. An odd and rustic place with summer tent revivals, the camp was full of sincere women in calico dresses who took God at His word. They were good and generous people. They also believed make-up was a grave sin, and yet they had not tossed out my mother, who comparatively speaking looked like she was dragged over the Dillard's make-up counter.
    She picked up my glass, sipping to taste it. "Oh, I used too much honey."
    "Honey. That’s what I tasted. Lemonade needs sugar."
    "Sugar will kill you, Raleigh." She said it matter-of-factly. "You should have heard this preacher today. He came all the way from South Africa, a colored man. He was just marvelous. You could feel God flowing through him. And he told us about that apart tide problem they had."
    "‘Apartheid’?"
    "And he read from the book of Micah. Do you remember how much your father loved that book?