Read Online Alice's Tulips: A Novel by Sandra Dallas - Free Book Online Page B

says, “There’s enough left for her when she wakes up.”
    When Annie finished, she wet a dirty finger and picked up the crumbs, popping them into her mouth. “That’s most tasty,” she says. “You got salt? We ain’t had salt since we left home.”
    I took out the saltcellar and handed it to her, and Annie unscrewed the top and poured a spoonful into her hand and licked it, happy as a cat in spilt milk.
    “How old is that girl?” Mother Bullock asks.
    “Most nearly seven.”
    “How come you’re stealing from us?” I asks.
    “It’s not rightly stealing. We got nothing to eat.” She picked a crumb off the front of her dress, then stopped. “The nigger said—” She stopped.
    “You can call him Lucky,” Mother Bullock says. “He knows you been stealing?”
    “He says you got plenty. He says he won’t tell it if we takes what we needs. But he says don’t us’ns dare to steal. We been living nights in that nice house by the crick. We hide in the woods of a day.”
    “You mean that shack?” I asks, but Mother Bullock shushed me. “Where’d you come from?”
    “Kentuck. Misery has came down on us hard. The Seceders burnt us out and treated us common.”
    “You got a husband?”
    “Did. I swan Joybell’s no woods colt. No ma’am. She ain’t a bastard. The Rebs kilt her pappy.” Annie’s eyes got bright, but she didn’t cry. “We have walked a piece to get here, and we are plain wore out. We couldn’t go no farther.”
    “That blind baby walked all the way from Kentucky, and barefoot? It’s a wonder she didn’t kill herself,” I says.
    Annie held her head up high. “She’s real sure on her feet and most always knows where she’s going and hardly ever runs into nothing. That post ought not to have been there. Besides, we had to walk. You think some Secesh is gonna give us a mule? Where are we?”
    “Iowa,” I tells her.
    She frowned. “Iowa? I don’t know anything about Iowa. We went through a city half a day’s walk back. I never saw such a place. Was it New York?”
    “Slatyfork, Iowa.” Mother Bullock thought a moment. “You got lice, do you?”
    Annie’s eyes widened, and she sat up ramrod-straight and looked Mother Bullock in the eye. “No ma’am. We got no gray-backs. I keep myself clean. And Joybell, too. We ain’t trash, no we ain’t.” She slumped back in the chair and yawned, and Mother Bullock told her to lie down with Joybell.
    “How long since you slept in a bed?” she asks.
    “I ain’t never slept in a bed.”
    “Never?” I asks.
    “Aways wanted to.”
    I turned to Mother Bullock. “Did you ever hear such a thing?”
    “Leave be, Alice. You go lay down next to your girl, Mrs. Tatum.”
    As she got up, I asks, “How old are you?”
    “I don’t know for sure. I ain’t kept track. Maybe eighteen or thereabouts.”
    “Me, too. Listen to that, Mother Bullock. She’s the same age as me. Would you have guessed it?”
    “I’d have guessed she was older,” Mother Bullock says, which I misdoubt was a compliment to me.
    Annie climbed into bed and giggled; then she frowned and asked how to keep from rolling off. I laughed, but Mother Bullock told her people hardly ever fall out of bed. Right now, Annie is curled up around her baby like a bitch around a pup, sleeping so hard, a dinner bell wouldn’t wake her.
    Mother Bullock has gone to scold Lucky for not telling her about the trespassers. After all, it’s our place, not his, to give succor, if we want to. I’m to keep an eye on Mrs. Tatum, because we don’t know for sure that she won’t rob us blind.
    I stopped just now because Annie had gotten up with no more noise than a snake and come up behind me and looked over my shoulder. She’s sneaky, and it’s no wonder we didn’t catch her before now. When she touched my arm, I jumped so high, I almost hit my head on the ceiling. Then I put my hand over the letter so’s she couldn’t read it. But she says, “I went to school, but what I learned, I