The Day of Small Things Read Free

to touch ary drop again. And I never will.
    I take another sup of tonic. This one goes down easierand I begin to feel some better. I wonder if this Cordelia Ledbetter tonic can really do what all it claims. The change is awful hard on a woman what with the night sweats and the all-overs. Oh, hit seems fine not having to fool with them bloody rags every month, but on the other side, hit just means a woman don’t get no rest. When a woman’s period is on her, she can’t make kraut or hit’ll go bad, can’t walk in the cucumbers or they’ll mildew—oh, they’s a world of things she can’t do at that time. And iffen a woman feels real puny for a few days every month, why, she can slack off on her work and no one thinks the worse of her.
    Least has come creeping out the door and gone back to the edge of the boxwoods. I don’t say nothing but I watch as she sets herself down in the dirt and starts in a-playing with the old corncobs she calls her babies. She’s made a bed for them with some of the big green leaves from the cucumber tree near the chicken house, and she’s laying them ol cobs down side by each on one leaf and covering them with another. She begins to sing one of them quare little tunes of hern and the sound goes right through my head.
    It is as bothersome as a circling wasper, so I call to her and hold out the candy stick. The child stares at it for the longest time before she creeps nigh. Then, without looking me in the face, she grabs hold and scuttles like a rat back into her hidey-hole.
    Such a quare child. Not like the others—I think back on how it once was. Happy times long ago, like the old song says.
    Me and Hobart wed in ’97 and the babes begun to come, one every year at first. Little Hobe in ’98, then Lemuel, then Willoree—like popping peas out of a pod.
    “Two boys to help with the clearing and plowing and a girl to help you in the house,” Hobart said, swelling up proud as he looked at our three strong young uns. “Hit’s a good start. We’ll pay off what we owe on this place and be free and clear in no time.”
    Ay, law, when you’re young and strong, hit seems you can beat the world. Those first years we worked like dogs, not making much but always putting some by to pay off what we owed on the place. I’d spread out a quilt at the edge of the field and lay the babies on it where I could keep watch over them as I hoed. Back then I could work as hard as ary man, even when I was in the family way.
    The next three to come was girls but Hobart never faulted me. “If they can work like their mama,” says he, “I’ll have nothing to complain of.”
    I take one more sup of Cordelia Ledbetter and stretch out my fingers. Seems to me the tonic has warmed them and made them feel more limber-like.
    Least has come back out and is setting with her play babies and rocking to and fro, singing again, but it don’t worry me so much now. I call it singing but they ain’t no words what mean anything. That child still don’t talk like she ought—oh, she’ll say a word here or there iffen she wants a thing—and she can say No, that’s for sure, but she don’t string her words together. “Oh-eee-oh-iii,” is what she’s singing, over and over to her corncob babies.
    Was a time I could line up
my
babies like that, I think, and the recollection brings hot tears to my eyes as I name them over—Little Hobe, Lemuel, and Willoree … Zelma, Porsha, and Fairlight. And next to last the twins, though Dexter died of the summer complaint before hewas three months old, leaving Little Brother. Seven fine young uns.
    And Little Hobe went off to the Great War and come back in a box; Lemuel died just a month after his daddy, the both of them killed by the fall of the same big tree—though Hobart was killed outright and Lemuel lingered, howling from the pain and mad with the fever. Then, afore I could turn about, each by each the girls married and moved off.
    One thing is for sure, though, I don’t