Read Online Curse the Names by Robert Arellano - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Robert Arellano
Tags: Horror
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married Maria Montoya. She gave birth to children listed in the registry as male, 1861; fem., 1865; fem., 1872.
The deaths of the mother, the son, and the two girls were all recorded as 1874. That would have made the son only thirteen years old.
There was no death recorded for Mr. Johnson, at least not by 1875. I searched again to see if I could find a Book no. 2 , but I got No documents found matching your request.
Book no. 1 was the only volume available online.
Could a thirteen-year-old have done something like that? Maybe the contemporaneous deaths had been caused by disease.
OCLC FirstSearch. Votre session est terminée.
The sky was lightening in the east. Shivering under the effect of the Mudslides and the bourbon, I lay down on the living room couch.
My nightmare did not begin right away. It came on gradually like a virus. Maybe if I looked closely I would have seen that milder symptoms had already set in. Or maybe if I had never gone back to the house, the nightmare would never have started in the first place.
It happened more than a hundred winters ago, when the snow got above the roofline. The month of January 1874, the average temperature 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The high 21 degrees, and the lowest recorded -23. The snow down in the valley had measured 84 inches. It’s hard to imagine what the snowdrifts of Ledoux had made of a baseline seven feet of snow.
You come to this valley to farm. The land is good and cheap for a homesteader, and if the Spanish people didn’t understand you, all the better that they should leave you alone. Idle associations and casual conversations lead to blasphemous speech, sinful ruminations, and evil actions. It is good when you arrive with your family in the spring and good to work hard and be outside all day in the summer. Just gathering wood goes on hours after dark on moonlit nights, and you come home so exhausted there is barely energy for the meal and Bible study before the onset of a sleep like death. Then, with the first light of dawn and the rooster’s strangled cry, back to work.
Autumn brings the harvest and opportunities to instill with prayer and instruction the knowledge that rewards are not from our labor alone but for the glory of God. The more His favor was upon us, the more we needed to pray. Sometimes for hours in the dark, and if one is caught dropping off, you have a willow switch with which to administer penance to the flesh that God might spare their souls.
Winter is all that you did not foresee. The days are too cold to work the earth. There is only so much wood to split. And the nights are long, and even with prayer petitioning blessings in the spring there are still many idle hours to fill between sleep. The Spanish families fill them with card games, marble tournaments, and telling legends from their wicked folklore—idolatries, blasphemies. You will not let your children fall into such corruption. If you had been able to look at it clearly—if your brother in town had been able to see you—you might have realized that which torments you is not the soul and the spirit, but a variant of cabin fever. Instead, you enforce a code of silence among family in the winter. You do not believe in idle talk. The only book you keep in the house is the Bible. Deciding that speech is the inception of vice, you forbid speaking altogether.
You impose a strict code of silence among your wife and three children—a son, a young daughter, and a baby girl. You had better eat right in the Johnson house, because even a rumble of the stomach adds up against you on the way to a beating. The house becomes a tomb. No sniffling, hiccupping, or sighing. You catch a cold, you go out to the barn to cough.
The wind ducts in from the chimney, and it howls down to the floor in the corner where the boy sleeps with the dusty blanket his mother knit for him from churro wool. He looks up at the mica pane that serves as the family’s only window—covered with snow.
It is one
The deaths of the mother, the son, and the two girls were all recorded as 1874. That would have made the son only thirteen years old.
There was no death recorded for Mr. Johnson, at least not by 1875. I searched again to see if I could find a Book no. 2 , but I got No documents found matching your request.
Book no. 1 was the only volume available online.
Could a thirteen-year-old have done something like that? Maybe the contemporaneous deaths had been caused by disease.
OCLC FirstSearch. Votre session est terminée.
The sky was lightening in the east. Shivering under the effect of the Mudslides and the bourbon, I lay down on the living room couch.
My nightmare did not begin right away. It came on gradually like a virus. Maybe if I looked closely I would have seen that milder symptoms had already set in. Or maybe if I had never gone back to the house, the nightmare would never have started in the first place.
It happened more than a hundred winters ago, when the snow got above the roofline. The month of January 1874, the average temperature 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The high 21 degrees, and the lowest recorded -23. The snow down in the valley had measured 84 inches. It’s hard to imagine what the snowdrifts of Ledoux had made of a baseline seven feet of snow.
You come to this valley to farm. The land is good and cheap for a homesteader, and if the Spanish people didn’t understand you, all the better that they should leave you alone. Idle associations and casual conversations lead to blasphemous speech, sinful ruminations, and evil actions. It is good when you arrive with your family in the spring and good to work hard and be outside all day in the summer. Just gathering wood goes on hours after dark on moonlit nights, and you come home so exhausted there is barely energy for the meal and Bible study before the onset of a sleep like death. Then, with the first light of dawn and the rooster’s strangled cry, back to work.
Autumn brings the harvest and opportunities to instill with prayer and instruction the knowledge that rewards are not from our labor alone but for the glory of God. The more His favor was upon us, the more we needed to pray. Sometimes for hours in the dark, and if one is caught dropping off, you have a willow switch with which to administer penance to the flesh that God might spare their souls.
Winter is all that you did not foresee. The days are too cold to work the earth. There is only so much wood to split. And the nights are long, and even with prayer petitioning blessings in the spring there are still many idle hours to fill between sleep. The Spanish families fill them with card games, marble tournaments, and telling legends from their wicked folklore—idolatries, blasphemies. You will not let your children fall into such corruption. If you had been able to look at it clearly—if your brother in town had been able to see you—you might have realized that which torments you is not the soul and the spirit, but a variant of cabin fever. Instead, you enforce a code of silence among family in the winter. You do not believe in idle talk. The only book you keep in the house is the Bible. Deciding that speech is the inception of vice, you forbid speaking altogether.
You impose a strict code of silence among your wife and three children—a son, a young daughter, and a baby girl. You had better eat right in the Johnson house, because even a rumble of the stomach adds up against you on the way to a beating. The house becomes a tomb. No sniffling, hiccupping, or sighing. You catch a cold, you go out to the barn to cough.
The wind ducts in from the chimney, and it howls down to the floor in the corner where the boy sleeps with the dusty blanket his mother knit for him from churro wool. He looks up at the mica pane that serves as the family’s only window—covered with snow.
It is one
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