Orphan Girl Read Free Page A

time, I could not understand why her belly was so big and the rest of her was shrinking. Her arms weren’t much bigger around than mine was.
    Papa did not treat her any better after Anna died. I heard him cussing and fussing at her, telling her the next baby had better be a boy. I reckon he wanted a son because he thought a boy could work the fields better than a girl could.
    I knew I was a disappointment to my father, so was Anna. I never could get enough cotton in my sack to please him and Anna’s whining aggravated him. He kept telling me that I was going to have to work harder and quit daydreaming so much. He would holler at little Anna to hush up when she cried. That was a long time ago, a long time gone…
    Life on the farm was hard; daydreaming was the only relief I had from chores, the only escape from a cruel world… Of course, I’d never had anything to dream about until the year before Mama and Anna died, because I had never been anywhere except the farm. However, once Papa took me into town, I knew there was more to this world than dirt fields, cotton, and corn. Thereafter, I daydreamed all the time, but it festered in my papa’s soul and made him even grumpier if that was possible.
    Citronelle was not a big town, but to me, it was larger than life. It was a beautiful place, a place of wonderment. The town was full of houses and buildings of all sizes. It had a wide variety of trees, flowers of all assortments, too. Purple and white flowered wisteria vines climbed telephone poles, fence rails, trees, and porch columns, anything they could grow on, they did. The scent of those purple-clustered flowers was the prettiest smell I had ever smelt in my young life.
    I remember sitting beside my papa on the seat of the wagon as we rounded a bend and came upon a road that was lined on either side with large oak trees. It was dark and cool beneath the canopy of them. The avenue of oaks was long enough that the coolness of it dried the sweat that was trickling down my back.
    When we passed from beneath the canopy of oaks, we come upon the town. There were dozens of houses and streets; I‘d never seen so many streets and houses in my life. The houses ranged from small shotgun houses on the outskirts of town, to great big houses the closer we got to the center of town. After a while, we came to the main part of town.
    I remember looking atop a hill and seeing for the first time in my life, railroad tracks. Papa stopped the mule in front of a big platform near the tracks. After he was finished unloading the wagon, he stood talking to a fat-bellied, bald headed man. Once we pulled away from the platform, he stopped in front of the mercantile store.
    I knew better than to say anything or get off the wagon. Before we left home, he told me I had better be seen and not heard. He said he would take his strap to me if I got off the wagon without him telling me to. You know, we made that entire trip without saying a single word to one another… but that was Papa; he never spoke much at all, at least not to me.
    He did buy me a licorice whip that day though. He handed to me when he got back onto the wagon after he loaded the supplies from the mercantile. It was the second time I ever remembered eating one.
     

 
     
     
     
    Two
    Dark is the Night, Cold was the Ground
     
    Winter 1942
    I don’t know the exact date my mama died, just that it was the winter of ‘42. I know it was a couple of months after Anna had passed away and that it was late in the year. I remember waking up just as the sun was rising. It was cold in the house because Mama had not yet started a fire. There was a frost on the ground. I remember feeling it crunch underfoot as I walked to the outhouse and back.
    When I first woke up, I thought I woke before my folks, but when I went back inside, I saw that Mama was still lying in her bed; Papa was gone. I walked over to the bed and touched her arm; it was cold. She was the same color blue around her mouth that