Winter Birds Read Online Free PDF Page A

second winter in the house, Papa found a place he thought was better, and you moved again.
    IN THE Pack House Amis John got his nickname—Duck—by taking his first steps through a mudhole. He had his share of cuts and bruises but they healed quickly, and the doctors soon declared him as normal as Allen before him as far as bleeding was concerned. Mama breathed easier when she found that out. Even with a new baby she watched you every minute, Danny, and you never stepped out of the house without hearing her warning to be careful. You were always careful. You never walked barefoot in the grass. For a while your spells of bleeding didn’t come so often. You were happy, listening to Mama sing as she changed Duck’s diapers, calling Amy Kay or you to come hold the pins.
    After moving to a new house Papa was always calm for a while, as if in finding a new place to live he accomplished something that eased his mind. But this house was particularly ugly. Mama said it looked like it hadn’t been painted in forty years. Amy and you took turns finding bits of old paint on the clapboards outside. You couldn’t tell what color the house had been, though Amy swore it was powder blue. Amy studied the Sears catalog and knew what all the colors were. The house had three rooms standing side by side: a kitchen and two bedrooms, with a porch in the back. Behind a grove of saplings stood the outhouse, surrounded by mint-green grass and lush goldenrod.
    That spring Papa paid three hundred dollars for an old brown Ford with half a seat in the back. Mama put a three-legged stool there in place of the missing half-seat and told Amy Kay always to sit there because it was her special place. Because of his arm Papa had to drive with a steering knob. But he never let Mama drive when he was with her.
    To help pay for the car Mama got farm work, and because there was no place for you to go, you all went to work with her. In the early months of spring she helped a farmer down the road set out his baby tobacco plants into the fields. In the summer she worked with the other women in the neighborhood tying the green tobacco on sticks so it could be hung in barns to be cured. You children played in the fields near the women and their trucks of green tobacco. You remember the hats the womenwore, bright-colored straw sun hats with wide brims and striped strings that tied under the women’s soft chins. The women rolled their pants past their pale, dimpled knees. Mama’s hat was blue as a robin’s egg and her string was striped red and white. On one of her knees was a small purple scar from a fight with one of her brothers during which he hit her with a garden hoe. Her white legs freckled in the sun, never turning an even shade of brown like the other women. Mama laughed and talked with the women all day long, waiting for the tractor or the mules to drag another creaking truck of tobacco from the fields. She had a different way of looping the tobacco onto the stick than the local women were used to, Mama having grown up in Pike County near Madisonville, hours away from Potter’s Lake. The Potter’s Lake women always watched her work, remarking that they sure couldn’t judge why people around here thought there was only one way to do a job when lo and behold here was Ellen Crell proving that people in different parts of the world could do the same job a different way. It was a revelation.
    You children wandered in and out of the barns, smelling the dry, bitter leaves and wondering what the big companies did to the tobacco to make cigarettes out of it. Amy Kay said they took all the dry leaves and made a big heap and then hired teams of horses to walk on the heap till there was nothing left but crushed powder. Which worked all right, Amy said, except sometimes the horses pissed on the tobacco, which was why some cigarettes had filters on them. Most days Amy stayed in the shade of thebarn tending Duck, who grinned at her