Valley of Bones Read Online Free PDF

sit in a corner for half an hour and miss recess but when they all left and I could hear the screaming of play outside I got off the chair I was in and went to the shelf where Mrs. Barrett kept the storytime books and took down a copy of Alice in Wonderland and started to read it. How I explained it to myself was that keeping the secret kept me in control of things, it seemed to me, and even at six I knew that my poor parents were not all that good at controlling stuff. Momma came to school a time or two and let Mrs. B. lecture at her and then she stopped coming entirely and I was on my own, a problem child, slow. And bad. Momma said, honey child, you better turn out pretty because it don’t look like you’re gonna be no big brain.
    After first grade I was in the dumb kid class. On most fine days I would run away at recess and go to Gran’s and read. Gran would take books out of the library for her to read to me, and I read through whatever was on the hall table, mostly animal stories and Nancy Drews, and Judy Blume stuff, and Madeleine L’Engle. The hardest part of all this was keeping it from Gran. She did want me to be bright like her, and it was sad her trying to teach me how to read and me not learning. I believe that was the worst thing I did before I got in with boys later. But the devil is all will and hardness of heart and the pleasure I got from being in his favor and the power of fooling the whole world was to me better than pleasing someone who loved me, and the way he did it was to say imagine the pleasure on her face when you finally show her who you really are, and that comforted me in my evil. And he also made me understand that if I showed, they would put me in the gifted and talented where the rich kids were and they would despise me for my clothes and my cracker ways. So many excuses for doing bad!
    Besides those books I read her World Book Encyclopedia. In the second grade I got from Aardvark, a large nocturnal burrowing mammal of Africa, to Dysprosium, a rare earth metallic element found in certain minerals. It wasn’t until the third gradethat I got to Eidetic Memory and found out what I was and that not many people were like me. And the devil said it was his gift, making me so that I wouldn’t forget, so that all the treasures of the world’s knowledge that he would show me would stay in my mind always, and poor fool that I was then I thought that not forgetting was a good thing instead of what it is, poison acid and gall, but I am a true witness with God’s help.
    So of course I remember it perfectly, a day in fourth grade after lunch sloppy joes carrots fries white cake with banana frosting, a rainy day so I’m in the classroom lounging with the dummies and there is Gran at the door of the room wearing her long yellow slicker and a plastic kerchief on her head pressing her dark curls like grapes in shrink wrap at the Winn-Dixie. She spoke to the teacher, who gave me a sympathetic look that sent a chill down into my belly, and then we got my little plastic raincoat with the hood and went out to the Dodge and drove off. The car smelled of cigarettes and the cologne she used lily of the valley and we drove in silence for a while and then she said there’s no easy way to tell this sugar but your Daddy drove his rig off a bridge in Alabama and he’s dead. I took it pretty calm considering, a lot calmer than Momma anyway who was screeching and banging her head on the arm of our sofa when we got home. I just watched her, feeling blank as the back wall of a garage. A good thing about being in thrall to Satan is you don’t feel much of the pain of human existence. He doesn’t care so why should you?
    Daddy’s people came in from Louisiana to bury him, a bunch of dark-skinned, black-haired people I never met before, the Garigeaus. They were Cajuns but they are not part of this story, since I never did them any harm, nor were they much interested in me. Along with the Garigeaus came a heavyset girl