Winter Birds Read Online Free PDF

from his blanket and made soft noises in his throat. Amy talked to him all day long, giving him her finger to play with and generally treating him as if he were a friend with whom she was conducting a serious, private conversation.
    For dinner you rode home in the truck and ate chicken Mama fried that morning, or else scrambled eggs and fatback, or macaroni and tomatoes, or whatever could be quickly cooked. By the time you sat at the table your faces ran with sweat from the kitchen heat. Mama kept a fly swatter next to her chair and used it during the meal, flicking the dead flies into the trash bag next to the stove. In a good week she could earn as much money as Papa. Together they stretched the dollars to cover the groceries and the rent and the car, and sometimes even farther than that to pay for the car insurance or pieces of the hospital bills.
    That fall Amy Kay started school. Mama drove you all to Gibsonville to buy Amy’s school clothes. You and Allen watched the two of them discuss dresses and shoes and prices, Mama bending to listen to Amy as seriously as if Amy were as tall and old as she. The tobacco money slid through Mama’s fingers into various cash register drawers. Since Mama carried Duck, Amy carried the bags, now and then stopping to admire her new things.
    Mama and Papa took her to school together the first day. Later when she came home Amy said school was fun, except the girl’s bathroom was so big she like to got lost in it. Once it was clear to you that Amy could always comehome when school was over, it didn’t seem like such a big deal any more.
    Soon after, in the autumn, Mama took in cured tobacco to grade, to make extra money. She cleared off the back porch and used the free space to house the sticks of dry, acrid-smelling leaves, sorting them into bundles according to the color and quality of the leaf. You helped her by taking the tobacco off the sticks. She tied the bundles of graded leaves at the top with a single soft leaf, tight as the handkerchiefs black women tied around their hair. The smell of the dry tobacco filled the house. When she was finished with one load it was packed in the back of the farmer’s truck and another load deposited on the porch.
    Papa watched Mama work when he came home at night. He would gaze at her fingers, quick and deft in the dusty piles of leaves, an angry, sullen look on his face. He would try to make her stop working and pay attention to him. “Why don’t you come in the house and talk to me,” he would say, “I haven’t had anybody to talk to all day,” and she would stop sometimes, if he was in a good mood, if she didn’t think the talk would end up in another fight.
    Winter came. This house proved as cold as the one before it, so Papa started to look for another place and soon found a house he thought was a better bargain. Mama didn’t always agree with Papa’s opinion of a house, but that!time she told him the place was much nicer. She needed to keep him in the best mood she could manage.Somehow that winter she would have to tell him she thought she was pregnant again.
    In early December you moved to the Blood House.
    THE BLOOD House stood in a confusion of tobacco barns, tool sheds, and rusted farm equipment, and had been used as a pack house for dried tobacco the last fifteen years, according to the farmer who owned it. This gentleman, Mr. Silas Henry Rejenkins, sported a belly that ballooned over his empty belt loops. None of his shirts, whether they buttoned down or pulled over, reached far enough to cover all of this vast fleshy melon. His navel, exposed to every kind of weather, sunk like a gulch into his soft, hairy stomach. The first day Amy and you saw him waddling about the farmyard Amy told you, “I bet that old man puts boogers in his bellybutton.”
    Mr. Rejenkins agreed to rent Papa the house for next to nothing, provided Papa would let Mr. Rejenkins store cured tobacco in the