Walking Through Shadows Read Free

oldest, so I stopped being young a long time ago.” She told me this after I had taken a huge piece of birthday cake down to the little dark room that was the smoke house behind the dairy where she would live for over four months. I couldn’t believe that anyone in their right mind would want to live in the place where Daddy used to hang hog carcasses, but Sheila acted like she had moved into the Taj Mahal. Mama told her she had some linoleum left over from the kitchen renovation that a hired hand would put down for her, and she gave her our old blue ruffled curtains for the one window, but looking around the cement walls, I doubted they would help much.
    “When you been sleeping four to a bed, this seems like a triple-wide heavenly resting place,” Sheila said, patting the thin single mattress Daddy had dragged out of our attic.
    “You don’t have anywhere to put your clothes and things,” I said looking around the empty space. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been told about something so important as a new person living in our backyard, but Mama said Sheila hadn’t been expected for another week, and I suspected the handprint bruises on her arm were the reason she came when she did.
    Sheila smiled. “I ain’t got much, and I reckon I can keep them right here in this bag.” She lifted the satchel onto the bed and opened it. She pulled out a wooden-handled hairbrush, a pair of panties with tired elastic, a toothbrush, a pair of badly worn and scuffed brown shoes, a beige man’s work shirt, a calico skirt, and a small tin of saltine crackers. “In case I got hungry ’fore getting here,” she said extending them in my direction. I shook my head, and remembering the cake, I pushed it toward her.
    She fell on it. I stood beside the bed watching as she shoved large clumps into her mouth like a starving mongrel. I had brought a fork balanced on the blue-flowered saucer, but she ignored it, using her fingers to break off chunks of chocolate icing which rimmed her small mouth when she finally licked the last crumbs right off the plate.
    “Delicious,” she finally said. “I heared your mama was a good cook. A good woman too.”
    I nodded. Being Rowena Cotton’s daughter had been a trial from my first step. People seemed to think I’d just naturally have all of her good traits, and no bad ones of my own. Suddenly, I felt envious of Sheila coming from a family that I had never heard of. The Cottons and the Bancrofts, who were my mother’s people, were well-known in the Lexie County community, and I was constantly being reminded that “other” people did this or that, but “we” knew better. My mother expected more of herself, and unfortunately, of me.
    Mama’s goodness had reached its zenith when Lil’ Bit had come to live with us. For nine years I had been an only child, pampered, petted, treasured because, by all accounts, Mama was barren after laboring for two days to shove my reluctant self out into Grandma’s bedroom where Daddy had paced for all forty-eight hours of Mama’s Terrible Ordeal. I still felt some guilt about my part in this horror story, which Mama still whispered to her friends at Baptist Circle Meeting. Mama said that, as soon as Grandma wiped me off and handed me to her, the late afternoon sun dipped in the sky to shine through the screen window so that my head was bathed in golden spots that looked like a connect-the-dots halo. I suspected much later that this story was embellished to curtail any devilish behavior unbecoming an angel.
    Looking over at Sheila repacking her bag, humming a church hymn, I tried to imagine being one of ten children. As an only child, I had been reduced to begging cousins to come over for spend-the-nights, creating a cat and dog vocabulary, and summoning Janice, my pretend girlfriend who was so boring and predictable I had finally killed her off when I was six. But being a single child had advantages, too. I was assured of getting the pulley bone when Mama