When I Crossed No-Bob Read Online Free PDF

write how Momma gave me sage and catnip to break my hives when I was a baby, and how later she showed me the ways to heal because, she told me, living amongst O'Donnells you need to know all the ways of healing.
    I write about how right before he left, Pappy got into that brawl with Garner O'Donnell, the brother he plowed. I write how Garner shot Pappy. I write how exactly Momma sewed Pappy up and made a poultice of mullein and other healing herbs. And with that poultice, he left. Pappy up and left us.
    I write and write. I write about Uncle Nub and Uncle Stick, who lived across the way from each other. Neither one of them had ears. I write until my hand hurts.

    After the noon meal, while Mr. Frank naps against one of the bigger trees in the schoolyard, me and Little Bit drape a black snake across his ankles. All the schoolchildren stop the games they would not play with me. They come have themselves a look, and already they are giggling. The snake is dead, but Mr. Frank doesn't know that.
    He wakes up all right and he keeps still the way you are supposed to around a snake. He lays there, waiting for it to slide away, and we children can hardly stand it. Maybe he hears someone giggle, or maybe he figures things out his own self, but when he sees that the snake is a might slow and it's not spitting out its forked tongue, licking its snake lips, Mr. Frank carefully lifts a stick and flips that snake fast. He sees that snake flop dead with a thud, and this is when we all laugh. Maybe Mr. Frank doesn't know what I know about snakes. King snakes and black snakes and green snakes aren't poisonous here. But watch out for a water moccasin, a copperhead, or a ground rattler. They are plenty harmful.

    When we children see that Mr. Frank is not laughing, not even smiling, everyone around me runs and hides, leaving just me and Little Bit standing there.
    Turns out Mr. Frank doesn't like the joke.
    I can see from Mr. Frank's eyes that he wants to whup us both good, but he does not. He sits us down in seats in the front of the schoolhouse and he has me and Little Bit copy down over and over what he calls the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
    Then he takes Little Bit to the back of the room where I hear him whisper "Shameful."
    I feel terrible bad about what I done. Mr. Frank and Miss Irene took me in on their wedding day, and what do I do? I lay a dead black snake across his legs. What kind of a thank-you is that?

    How come being nasty comes so easy to me?
    As I copy the words, I slip the heels of my feet out of my shoes. Mr. Frank gave me these shoes. He made them himself, and darn it all if they are not the hardest, stiffest, most uncomfortable things I ever wore. They are brown brogans that come up just above my ankle and they are no good for running or climbing. He made them from cowhide, tanned on his own place, but I slip them off and wiggle my toes in the air.
    I think about No-Bob then, where I always went barefooted. My feet know the land there. I know the houses, the people—my people. I know every stream, field, tree, animal, and a good many rocks too. Not knowing such things here in this place, always having to consider right from wrong, wears me out. Every day there is so much thinking to do, figuring, conjecturing. And that is
outside
the schoolhouse.
    On the walk home from school, Mr. Frank tells me he has read what I wrote today in school and he says I did a good job. At first I think he's talking about the golden rule lines, but then I remember the other things I wrote about No-Bob.
    "I know it's hard for you to be away from your home and your people and everything that you know so well," he says. "It must be especially hard to learn new ways of doing things."

    I stare at a magnolia tree then and notice the buds turning red, and it doesn't seem right or real that Momma's not seeing it too. These days feel mixed up because Momma's not here, not beside me looking, watching, telling me