Blackberry Road by Jodi Lea Stewart

Author:Jodi Lea Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Progressive Rising Phoenix Press, L
Published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty Six

Roastnears

All the boys are at the Henson’s place with Dad, Mr. Henson, and the Henson family hammering up more pens to have a rodeo this Saturday. Even Jay Bird got to go since he gets to play with Mr. Henson’s son Benny, who’s the same age as him. Mama sent them off with cold sausage patties and biscuits and our biggest jars full of well water. She pointed me to the heap of dirty clothes she’d gathered from everywhere in tarnation.

Oh, law, did I ever cuss in my own head about that. All that good revival preaching and singing we attended after Tommy came back to life, and I’m still cussing. Whoever said it was women’s work to do the cooking and the dishes and the washing? Why can’t I do what the boys do? It ain’t fair, and it never will be. It boils my blood and out comes those cuss words.

Talk about boiling, I’m boiling my third tub full of bloomers and long handles. My knuckles are sorely raw from scrubbing on the washboard all morning, even with Mama and Jean taking turns with me. Jean boiled some thick clothes’ starch made with flour and water and we dunked the best overalls and shirts in it before hanging them on the clothes line. Doodles handed me the clothespins, so I guess she’ll start helping out around here. Thinking of that kind of makes me sad for my little sis.

I’m taking the empty clothes basket to the house and Jean meets me with a measure tape and loops it around my waist. “Jean, do you have to do that right now?”

“Hold still. You want pretty clothes when school starts don’t you?”

I do want nice dresses, but I can’t stand all the fussing before they get made. All that measuring and pinning and snipping with scissors makes me want to run to the woods. I let out a big groan so’s Jean knows I hate it, but I go ahead and allow her to tape measure me for about the hundredth time. Jean and Mama have been so dead set on measuring me lately you’d think I was a dressed scarecrow about to be stuck on a pole in the kafir corn.

Jean’s got it in her head they need to order the material for my school-term dresses and make my new winter underwear at the same time. I don’t like any talk whatsoever about underwear, but they don’t care anything about my modesty. I ask you, would you like it if your mama and sister cut strips of innertube rubber to hold up the legs and waist of your bloomers they’re sewing, and they did it in front of everyone? ’Course you wouldn’t, and I don’t like it, neither. Besides, if I’m growing like a weed like they say, who says I won’t grow out of the new underwear and those new dresses they’re going to make before September?

I know the problem is Jean’s just restless, ’bout as much as Calvin.

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