Homeland and Other Stories Read Free

fearful amount of time moving things needlessly from one place to another.
    â€œI see you, Waterbug,” said Great Mam in the darkness, though what she probably meant was that she heard me. All I could see was the glow of her pipe bowl moving above the porch swing.
    â€œTell me the waterbug story tonight,” I said, settling onto the swing. The fireflies were blinking on and off in the black air above the front yard.
    â€œNo, I won’t,” she said. The orange glow moved to her lap, and faded from bright to dim. “I’ll tell you another time.”
    The swing squeaked its sad song, and I thought about Tennessee. It had never occurred to me that the place where Great Mam had been a child was still on this earth. “Why’d you go away from home?” I asked her.
    â€œYou have to marry outside your clan,” she said. “That’s law. And all the people we knew were Bird Clan. All the others were gone. So when Stewart Murray came and made baby eyes at me, I had to go with him.” She laughed. “I liked his horse.”
    I imagined the two of them on a frisking, strong horse, crossing the mountains to Kentucky. Great Mam with black hair. “Weren’t you afraid to go?” I asked.
    â€œOh, yes I was. The canebrakes were high as a house. I was afraid we’d get lost.”
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    We were to leave on Saturday after Papa got off work. He worked days then, after many graveyard-shift years during which we rarely saw him except asleep, snoring and waking throughout the afternoon, with Mother forever forced to shush us; it was too easy to forget someone was trying to sleep in daylight. My father was a soft-spoken man who sometimes drank but was never mean. He had thick black hair, no beard stubble at all nor hair on his chest, and a nose he called his Cherokee nose. Mother said she thanked the Lord that at least He had seen fit not to putthat nose on her children. She also claimed he wore his hair long to flout her, although it wasn’t truly long, in our opinion. His nickname in the mine was “Indian John.”
    There wasn’t much to get ready for the trip. All we had to do in the morning was wait for afternoon. Mother was in the house scrubbing so it would be clean when we came back. The primary business of Mother’s life was scrubbing things, and she herself looked scrubbed. Her skin was the color of a clean boiled potato. We didn’t get in her way.
    My brothers were playing a ferocious game of cowboys and Indians in the backyard, but I soon defected to my own amusements along the yard’s weedy borders, picking morning glories, pretending to be a June bride. I grew tired of trying to weave the flowers into my coarse hair and decided to give them to Great Mam. I went around to the front and came up the three porch steps in one jump, just exactly the way Mother said a lady wouldn’t do.
    â€œSurprise,” I announced. “These are for you.” The flowers were already wilting in my hand.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have picked those,” she said.
    â€œThey were a present.” I sat down, feeling stung.
    â€œThose are not mine to have and not yours to pick,” she said, looking at me, not with anger but with intensity. Her brown pupils were as dark as two pits in the earth. “A flower is alive, just as much as you are. A flower is your cousin. Didn’t you know that?”
    I said, No ma’am, that I didn’t.
    â€œWell, I’m telling you now, so you will know. Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken’s or a hog’s when you need it. If you’re hungry, then they’re happy to give their flesh up to you because they’re your relatives. But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower.”
    I said nothing.
    â€œThey ought to be left where they stand, Waterbug. You need to leave them for the small people to see. When they die they’ll fall where they are, and make a