Black Angels by Linda Beatrice Brown Read Free Book Online

know she was crying, but he knew.
    She’d say, “She was just sick at heart was all. Your mama was just sick at heart,” and then she’d say, “Go long now, don’t ask me no more.”
    Maybe his mam could see him up in Heaven. He could feel himself getting sleepy and he was glad. He was tired of thinking of Aunt Eugenia, Unc Steph, the dead men blown apart, all of it, over and over. As he drifted off, pictures of his mam’s face floated through his mind. Her name was Lucymae. He missed her.
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    When she woke up from her nap, Luke was sitting there chewing.
    â€œOoh, what are you eating?” Daylily asked. “You got berries. I can see your mouth all blue round your lips. You got berries. Gimme some!”
    Luke shook his head. “Nope. They mine.”
    Daylily protested. “That ain’t fair!”
    By this time Caswell was awake. “I want some,” he whined. “I should have some too.”
    â€œYou don’t even know what I got,” Luke said. He was hiding the berries under the coat he’d just found a few hours before. He uncovered the rest of the berries with a flourish. “There! I brought y’all a surprise! We got berries for supper!”
    Daylily looked at the berries in the hats. “Where you get these hats, Luke?”
    â€œFound em, on the ground. Eat them berries and say thank you.”
    She was already licking the juice off her lips.

CHAPTER 7
    GOOD-BYE
    The berries were good, but by morning her stomach felt empty again. She hated to think of the sun coming up because she had to tell Caswell. Otherwise he’d be yelling about his Mamadear forever. They had spent another night in the shed, because Luke said they needed to wait until morning to start out again. Besides he heard voices of men over on that battlefield and he knew that they were probably soldiers burying the dead. They were all hungry, but looking for food meant going out there where there were dangerous men and dead bodies.
    Daylily was lying wrapped in her coat. A bad smell hit her nostrils as soon as she was fully awake. It was still dark. They were all sleeping warm for the first time in two nights. She took a sip of water from her canteen and Caswell sat up slowly. He looked terrible. His eyes were red rimmed. He had been crying for two days and had thrown up yesterday.
    â€œI got to go,” he said to Daylily. She glanced in Luke’s direction. He was sleeping hard. There was no sense waking Luke yet, but she knew Caswell was going to raise a ruckus. She put her finger across her lips, indicating he should be quiet, and took him outside the shack, checking first one direction and then the other.
    They seemed to be entirely alone. The sky was a soft gray, just before sunrise. Daylily looked quickly toward what she knew had been the Burwell place. Still, she took him behind a scrubby bush near the shed.
    â€œI got to tell you somethin,” she said softly as he unbuttoned his pants. In the two days they’d been on the road, he’d given up hiding himself from her, and watched her face as he peed. He always had trouble closing his pants back up. Daylily thought he couldn’t have been more than six or maybe seven. The boy was probably used to some mammy doing that for him. She finished the trouser buttons and put her hands around his waist and sat him down on the ground. “I got to tell you bout your mama.”
    â€œYou don’t know nothin about my mama,” Caswell said. He picked at a bug bite of some kind. “You jus a nigger gal. How could you know something about my Mamadear? She’s a lady.”
    â€œI knows where the Burwell place was,” Daylily insisted, and she hurried on now, wanting to get it over with. “And it’s all gone. It’s burned down, Caswell. It’s gone.”
    He spit out his lower lip, which was beginning to tremble in spite of the scorn he tried to show. “How do you know