When Venus Fell Read Online Free PDF Page A

He said his daughters would always find their way.
    I had also used voodoo on Gib.
    I made a love charm from a piece of my straight black hair and a speck of congealed bacon grease, and I smeared the hairy goo on the back of the photo, above his face.
    Considering my successes with Nanny Robicheaux and Gib, I confidently set up a protective shrine for Mom. It included a piece of her hair, some of Pop’s whisker shavings, and my quartz rock. I hid it in my closet.
    “Take care of Pop and Ella for me until I get back homefrom the hospital,” she said cheerfully, and I promised. It was a heavy load for a first grader, even one deemed a child prodigy. “We are a very special family,” she said. “We don’t have grandparents, or aunts and uncles or cousins, like most other people. So we have to take care of each other especially well. You and Pop and Ella and me.”
    “I know. Stick like glue and shake our fists at Uncle Sam.”
    I remember her rubbing her forehead as she considered that. I had gotten the words from overhearing Pop discuss the government. “It’s not polite to shake your fist,” she countered. “Just give Ella and Pop lots of hugs while I’m gone.”
    “I promise. But you’ll be back right away—Pop says so. I just wish he weren’t going off to the hospital all the time, too. I don’t want Sister Mary Catherine to come here. She only watches Lawrence Welk on TV. If I could just go sit at the hospital I’d be real quiet and nobody’d even know I was waiting for you.”
    I’m sure Mom realized how frightened I was. “If you need to talk to someone you can talk to Gib in the wedding picture,” Mom said gently. “I’ve always known you like to share things with him. I mean, just in case you feel like you need to talk to someone until I come back home. He’ll always be there. Promise me you’ll talk to him?”
    “I promise. And I promise I’ll take the best care of Ella and Pop.”
    Mom hugged me. “Then I won’t worry about a thing,” she whispered. I latched my arms around her neck. She held me so long I fell asleep, and so my last memory of her is warmth, and peaceful dreams, and the scent of her perfume against my cheek.
    She died the next day, during what was supposed to be a routine hysterectomy; her congenitally weak heart couldn’t tolerate the anesthesia. I remember Pop sitting on my bed that night and holding on to me for dear life, and I remembercrying until I was sick—the first of many times like that. I remember patting his head in sympathy. I remember him crying against my hair. It was the only time I ever knew he was capable of tears.
    I was suddenly the lady of our house. I became the self-appointed helpmate of a brilliant but embittered father and a sweet, delicate baby sister who chirped like a bird when she was upset. Pop treated me like a small adult. Immediately he took Ella and me to a salon to have our black hair dyed blond, and he insisted we keep it that way; he was trying to erase even the smallest evidence of our ethnic background. He’d never forgotten the prejudice and abuse heaped on him as a child.
    I sensed he had changed in some hopeless ways I couldn’t understand yet. But he had big dreams for me and Ella, especially for me, and I knew I’d never let him down. Still, I was desperate for comfort and advice. I talked to Gib’s picture constantly.
    When I was older I understood that Pop began to withdraw from the light after he lost Mom. That he immediately started tightening the circle of people in our lives that he trusted. But when I was little I obeyed his strange whims blindly, with wild, devoted, miserable confusion.
    For a while I continued to believe I’d meet Gib someday. I needed to share my miseries with him face-to-face. I needed to tell him that, like him, I didn’t have a mother now. I asked Pop several times when we could go to Tennessee. Mom had promised. I was worried. I hadn’t gotten a card from Gib in a long time.
    We had