Homeland and Other Stories Read Free Page A

seed for next year.”
    â€œNobody cared about these,” I contended. “They weren’t but just weeds.”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter what they were or were not. It’s a bad thing to take for yourself something beautiful that belongs to everybody. Do you understand? To take it is a sin.”
    I didn’t, and I did. I could sense something of wasted life in the sticky leaves, translucent with death, and the purple flowers turning wrinkled and limp. I’d once brought home a balloon from a Ritchie child’s birthday party, and it had shriveled and shrunk with just such a slow blue agony.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said.
    â€œIt’s all right.” She patted my hands. “Just throw them over the porch rail there, give them back to the ground. The small people will come and take them back.”
    I threw the flowers over the railing in a clump, and came back, trying to rub the purple and green juices off my hands onto my dress. In my mother’s eyes, this would have been the first sin of my afternoon. I understood the difference between Great Mam’s rules and the Sunday-school variety, and that you could read Mother’s Bible forward and backward and never find where it said it’s a sin to pick flowers because they are our cousins.
    â€œI’ll try to remember,” I said.
    â€œI want you to,” said Great Mam. “I want you to tell your children.”
    â€œI’m not going to have any children,” I said. “No boy’s going to marry me. I’m too tall. I’ve got knob knees.”
    â€œDon’t ever say you hate what you are.” She tucked a loose sheaf of black hair behind my ear. “It’s an unkindness to those that made you. That’s like a red flower saying it’s too red, do you see what I mean?”
    â€œI guess,” I said.
    â€œYou will have children. And you’ll remember about the flowers,” she said, and I felt the weight of these promises fall like a deerskin pack between my shoulder blades.
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    By four o’clock we were waiting so hard we heard the truck crackle up the gravel road. Papa’s truck was a rust-colored Ford with complicated cracks hanging like spiderwebs in the corners of the windshield. He jumped out with his long, blue-jean strides and patted the round front fender.
    â€œOld Paint’s had her oats,” he said. “She’s raring to go.” This was a game he played with Great Mam. Sometimes she would say, “John Murray, you couldn’t ride a mule with a saddle on it,” and she’d laugh, and we would for a moment see the woman who raised Papa. Her bewilderment and pleasure, to have ended up with this broad-shouldered boy.
    Today she said nothing, and Papa went in for Mother. There was only room for three in the cab, so Jack and Nathan and I climbed into the back with the old quilt Mother gave us and a tarpaulin in case of rain.
    â€œWhat’s she waiting for, her own funeral?” Jack asked me.
    I looked at Great Mam, sitting still on the porch like a funny old doll. The whole house was crooked, the stoop sagged almost to the ground, and there sat Great Mam as straight as a schoolteacher’s ruler. Seeing her there, I fiercely wished to defend my feeling that I knew her better than others did.
    â€œShe doesn’t want to go,” I said. I knew as soon as I’d spoken that it was the absolute truth.
    â€œThat’s stupid. She’s the whole reason we’re going. Why wouldn’t she want to go see her people?”
    â€œI don’t know, Jack,” I said.
    Papa and Mother eventually came out of the house, Papa ina clean shirt already darkening under the arms, and Mother with her Sunday purse, the scuff marks freshly covered with white shoe polish. She came down the front steps in the bent-over way she walked when she wore high heels. Papa put his hand under Great Mam’s elbow and she silently climbed