To Make My Bread Read Online Free PDF Page A

spring.
    Bonnie pressed up against the frame to watch. When it was time she handed the thread. Emma sat at the head, high above the frame, but not so high as Ora, for Ora was a tall rawboned woman. Her face was rectangular and the features were big, as if they had been carved out of a rock on the side of a mountain. With a face like that she should have been enough to frighten anyone. But there was a kindness in her big mouth and when she was not talking her whole face showed a Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee feeling. She had great hands that surprised because they were so skillful with the needle. Jennie Martin looked so small beside the two others. Her tiny pinched face did not come far above the frame and she had to get out of the chair when the stitches took her across to the center of the quilt.
    â€œWhen we were young ones,” Emma said with her head bent over the frame, “they had regular parties for quilting.”
    â€œYes.” Ora snapped a piece of thread between her teeth. “We lived close together there. Hit was a big settlement.”
    â€œBut never any dancing, like here,” Emma said. “We had quiltings and maybe played Weavily Wheat or some other game, but no dancing. They thought Pap was a sinner for playing dance tunes.”
    They were really talking to Jennie Martin. She and Jim had recently moved to Possum Hollow from over North Range. Jim was kin of the McClures.
    â€œEverybody,” Ora said, “took to religion like boys take after a gal.”
    â€œBut the religion didn’t keep them from drinking,” Emma added. “Boys and men, they drank same as here.”
    â€œRecollect that still above the church?”
    â€œNear the haunted thicket. I reckon I do.”
    â€œThe men used to go up and come back refreshed as with the water of life,” Ora chuckled.
    â€œAnd sometimes they would tell about the ghost.”
    â€œI saw it once,” Ora said.
    Jennie Martin looked up. “Was hit real?”
    John sat down and leaned against the chimney. The women bent over the frame. It was late fall and the sun got down behind the west mountains early. There were already dark corners in the room where the light from the doors and the fire did not reach. Bonnie, feeling lonesome, went over and sat near John by the fire.
    â€œI saw something,” Ora said. “Something white way back in the laurel thicket. And hit moved.”
    â€œTell about it,” Emma urged.
    â€œLate one evening,” Ora said, talking mostly to Jennie, “Frank McClure and Jim McClure dared Emma and me to go up and see the ghost. It was just before church one evening. And we went.”
    Emma interrupted. “But when we got just below I was too scared to go any further.”
    Ora went right on. “The still was above the thicket in a little cove. The thicket was alongside a trail high up on the mountain. Hit was a dark thicket. The leaves were high on top and under were black limbs. Up above, the leaves rustled in the wind, but under where the dark limbs were hit was all quiet like church at night when the preacher is about to make a prayer.
    â€œWe got there and stood just outside the thicket with me standing between the two boys shivering and hoping I wouldn’t see what I had come to see. And while we watched something white rose up and moved around between the black limbs of laurel, something long and white.”
    Jennie Martin looked over her shoulder into the dark corner of the room. “Oh,” she gasped.
    â€œThere’s a lot of shadows in thickets,” Emma said.
    â€œI may be wrong,” Ora was not one to press too far. “I said so then, and I’ll say it now. But I wouldn’t go there by myself. It was a Tate still,” she explained to Jennie, “and old man Tate was killed up there by the Law. People said hit was his ghost.”
    â€œDo you believe the dead come back?” Jennie