Della and Darby by Susannah B. Lewis

Author:Susannah B. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

15

Birdena Redd

Easter Sunday, April 16, 2017

I grew up in a little old shack covered in flaky red paint out on Route 12, now known as Clayton Sheffield Memorial Highway. Our place sat back off the road a piece beneath a grove of pine trees, and the yard was dirt mostly because the grass couldn’t thrive in the shade. It was always freezing inside come winter because there wasn’t any insulation, and the flooring was made of plywood lying on a cinder block foundation that sometimes shook when walked on too hard. There were three of us kids in that little place with a mama who cried too much and a daddy who drank every time Mama cried.

Our mother, Melaena, must have had some kind of mental illness because it wasn’t regular for someone to cry like that or even to yell like that. Nothing made her happy—not her kids or a warm meal or a good night’s sleep. She wasn’t even glad when Daddy’s liver reached its limit and he died. We thought that might bring her some joy—to be rid of the man who threw her around like a rag doll, but it didn’t. Sounds awful cruel to say, but when our mother died, it was a relief for all of us. We didn’t have to worry about her feelings or walk on eggshells anymore.

We did all right without any stable parents. Harwell was the baby of the family, and I was right in the middle, two years older than him. Willa was eight when I was born and held me on her hip when she drew water from the well or swept the dirt off the creaking wooden porch steps. She gripped my tiny hand and walked me to the outhouse at night. Coyotes were my biggest fear in the world back then, and they oftentimes came right up to the edge of the yard to hoot and holler like bloodthirsty wolves. I had nightmares about them biting down on my neck while I sat on the toilet and dragging me into the woods. Willa walked me to the outhouse until I was at least fifteen years old. She was a grown woman by then, but still considered me her baby.

It was Willa who took us to Sand Hill Methodist for the first time. There was a boy down there she had her eye on, so she dressed me and Harwell up in our finest clothes, which weren’t fine at all. We wore shirts with mismatched buttons, baggy dresses, too-short slacks, and scuffed shoes, but we dug the dirt out from under our nails and brushed the tangles from our hair. Every person in that church turned in their creaking pews to eye us orphans when we showed up for the first time. But Willa didn’t let a couple of uppity folks’ snickers and whispers deter us from getting the Word of God in our hearts, or her getting a chance to know that tall black-headed boy who worked at the gas station.

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