A Parchment of Leaves by Silas House

Author:Silas House [House, Silas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Adult
ISBN: 9780345464972
Google: haqGzhEEv9QC
Amazon: 0345464974
Barnesnoble: 0345464974
Goodreads: 24804
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

For a long time I denied it to myself. I imagined that they were still right over there on Redbud. In the evenings I pictured them all setting out there on the porch, singing and talking. I heard the little voices of my cousins, smelled the laundry being boiled by my aunts. In daydreams I set with Mama and drank her coffee, felt her hands upon my head as she brushed my hair. I took a cool washrag and soothed the forehead of my father, who wrote me long, comical stories on his slate. Sometimes I would get up in the morning and think of going over there to see them. Then I would remember that they were not there. And the place I had been born in, the place where I had lived most of my life and had courted at and been married at, was gone, just as sure as they was. It was a dead place.

We heard that Tate Masters had tore down all of the houses. He’d built a new bridge and knocked earth into the creek. What did my great-grandmother Lucinda think as she stood on the cliffs, watching all of this? It was too much to bear. Picturing them going over them big mountains between home and Cherokee, North Carolina. Starting all over again with Daddy wrapped up in quilts in the backseat of my uncle’s car, like a little baby who has no choice but to go where his family takes him. My mother in the front seat, her arms crossed, silent. Her lips tight, hardly ever saying a word. Her heart closed, too.

Mama wrote me lots of letters for a while. I would let them sit days before I was able to read them. It hurt me so bad to think of my people being so far away that I got sick at the thought of it. Sometimes, after I would read a letter, I would let it drop. I would watch as the breeze carried it down the yard, twisting on the world’s breath. Before it could settle on the creek—where the pencil she always wrote in would have become more black—or caught in the fingers of a tree limb to yellow and grow brittle enough to crack, I ran and snatched it up. I should have just let them go. They were letters from the dead.

If Saul had not come home that spring, I would not have been able to stand it.

He come by train, and Aaron drove me and Esme to town to get him. I got in the back. Aidia sat right in the middle of the seat up front, one hand on Aaron’s thigh. Esme was beside her with her hands perched atop her purse and her shoulders held very squarely. Esme said riding in the back made her sick to her stomach, but instead of Aidia getting in the back with me and Birdie, she had just scooted over with a ragged sigh. Birdie sat upon my lap and I ran my fingers over her little hands, as pale and soft as dandelion fluff.

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