Read Online JEWEL by BRET LOTT - Free Book Online

thankful she still had years I couldn’t imagine before she’d be out of this house, and suddenly I saw all my children lined up and waiting for a meal like this one, when each in turn would give up the love and care we had for them to a future no one could count on, and for some reason I thought of Missy Cook dead and gone for near on twenty years, every moment she was alive filled with the bitter taste of a daughter who’d left her for a Choctaw halfbreed. You could take your child’s leaving, I saw, with either hate or love, no matter what doom or good luck they seemed headed for. Only hate or love, there wasn’t any ground between.
    I reached a hand across the table to James, held it out for him.
    Leston, still with his arm on the table, still not having looked at his son, only took in another bite of ham.
    James took my hand, held it tight, his smile only growing. There was no spite here, no malice aimed at his daddy, what I knew Leston believed moved his son to work at a mill instead of for him, and now made him want to join up and fight in a war we made our living from.
    Here was only our son, our oldest child.
    I said, “God will bless you, ” and I felt my eyes begin to fill. All the children were listening, this moment none of us ready for. Though Leston’s eyes were to his plate and nowhere else, I was still glad for my oldest’s hand in mine, for my youngest next to me, the rest of my children quiet and watching, glad, too, for the baby inside me, already growing.
    And just as my eyes brimmed, one smooth warm tear slipping down my cheek, there came a knock at the kitchen door. It was a quick sound, three crisp knocks and nothing else, and I stood, let go James’ hand and smiled down at my children, all of them watching me, mouths open.
    Their mother was crying, and I tried for a moment to think of another time I’d cried in front of them. There was nothing I could recall.
    I knew the knock, that strange authority Cathe ral’d taken on the older she got, and when I opened the door, there she stood, across her shoulders an ancient and frayed wedding ring quilt against the cold.
    Light from the kitchen fell down to her at the bottom of the steps, filled her eyes. She was looking right at me, staring at me. I swallowed, touched the back of one hand to the tear at my eye. I smiled.
    “Cathe ral, ” I said, and took a breath.
    Her eyes glistened in the light, her mouth closed tight.
    I heard a noise behind her, the scrape of boots on hard ground out there. A small orange ember rose up, grew, died down. Nelson was with her, smoking a cigarette some ten or fifteen feet behind her.
    “Go on, Cathe ral, ” he whispered, and the night air came into me, and I shivered, the same huge and awful shiver I’d begun my day with when Leston’d pulled back the sheet.
    Still she stared at me, this ability of hers to look me in the face for as long as she wished something she’d found, I knew, when she was born again, baptized in the Pearl River when she was-fourteen. She’d found Christ, she’d told me the next day, a little past two years after my momma’d died, Missy Cook trying to hold me by the throat every day of it. Each night after my momma died I’d been the one to turn off my gas light, and I’d taken to playing with Cathe ral as often as I could, even let Missy Cook know I was teaching her to read and write. For these transgressions, Missy Cook’d had Molly take a switch to Cathe ral, had spent three months straight coming into my room at night and turning up the gas, then turning it down again, even had Pastor come to the house each Thursday afternoon for a year, the two of us sitting in the parlor as though he were holding some kind of court. He asked me time and again if I knew disobeying Missy Cook was a sin, and if I knew teaching Cathe ral to read and write was almost nearly as bad. Then he’d go on to ask me how I felt about my momma perishing, and about whether or not I thought she might be