Part of Me by Kimberly Willis Holt Read Free Book Online

out squirrel hunting yesterday morning, I saw where you’d placed some of those traps on foot logs. Someone could get hurt if they were crossing over.”
    Merle Henry was hoping that a mink might do just that, but he knew his daddy meant a person. Windstorms had caused those logs to fall, forming natural bridges across the creek. Men and boys who hunted used them. So did his cousin Faye when she was taking a shortcut from her house to theirs. The thought of having to move those traps made him want to groan. Merle Henry had worked hard attaching them to the center of the logs and covering them with moss.
    â€œBetter move them,” Luther said.
    â€œYes, sir.”
    Merle Henry took off with Blue at his heels. It was dark outside. The moon looked like a lost balloon drifting between the clouds. His heart beat fast. Thoughts of mink pelts stirred in his head and his daddy’s words soon left him. Maybe today would be the day he’d finally trap a mink and get twenty dollars for it from Mr. Guidry. Mr. Guidry paid only twenty-five cents for a possum pelt and fifty cents for a raccoon’s. His parents let him keep all the money he made for trapping even though he was sure they could use it to help make ends meet.
    Merle Henry’s uncle Possum had been a great fur trapper. He gave him the traps to get started, allowing Merle Henry to pay for them as he made money from the pelts he sold. The payments stopped last fall when his mother met him after school to tell him that Uncle Possum had died from a heart attack. He’d been Merle Henry’s favorite uncle and she’d known that. Rose picked him up from school that day and took him for an ice cream cone at the Whip Dip in Lecompte, the next town over. She said some days were meant for ice cream and that there was nothing Uncle Possum would have loved more than to know that his favorite nephew was eating a vanilla swirl cone in honor of him. It had taken Merle Henry a long time to wrap his mind around the fact that his uncle was dead. Possum had been only twenty-seven years old.
    For the next two hours, Merle Henry and Blue checked each trap along the banks of Hurricane Creek. There was a wild smell in the woods that Merle Henry was addicted to—pine, dirt, moss. He loved to breathe it in, as if doing so made him a part of the woods, too.
    This morning was a two-possum day. Merle Henry found the first one in a trap inside the base of a hollow tree and another one on a foot log near a bend in the creek. Even though they weren’t minks, Merle Henry’s chest felt like it would burst open. He got such a rush from it. So did Blue. His tail wagged and he barked like crazy.
    Merle Henry rewarded Blue with a piece of beef jerky he kept in his pocket. Blue gobbled it up in no time.
    As they headed home, the sun barely peeked between the thick pine trunks. Merle Henry hoped he’d have time to skin the possums before going to school. He passed Kappel’s Nursery where the workers were already outside, watering the camellias and azaleas. As he approached the house, he noticed the truck was gone, meaning Luther had already left for his mechanic’s job in Oakdale. Rose cleared the sink while Gordie ate toast and read at the table.
    â€œHow’d you do?” Rose asked.
    â€œTwo possums.” Merle Henry glanced at his brother to see if he was impressed, but Gordie kept his head down and turned a page in his book.
    â€œYou want to see them, Gordie?”
    His brother didn’t even glance up. “I’ll see them later.”
    Sometimes, Merle Henry thought, it was easy to tell that Gordie and he weren’t full brothers. Before his parents moved to Forest Hill, his mother had married his dad in Houma when Gordie was four years old. Gordie’s mother had died the year before. Maybe that was why they were so different. Gordie didn’t like hunting or fishing. Come to think of it, Merle Henry had never seen him kill a