The Last Odd Day by Lynne Hinton Read Free Book Online

longer, until one evening I just didn’t leave. I preferred the silence and the reminders of being a part of something to a house full of noise and routine in which I did not fit.
    Aunt Carolyn would bring me food, check on me from time to time; but I found living by myself was not too unlike the couple of months I had lived with my daddy after Mama died. The only thing that was different was that the sunlight coming through the window seemed to last longer and the general spirit of the house, at least for a little while, was lighter.
    For about nine months I lived by myself like a hermit. I wore my mother’s clothes, the dresses, all made from cotton, a lavender one with faded blue flowers, a spring pink one dotted with tiny white buttons, a long black skirt that fell well below my ankles. I wore the pearl earrings she had won in a raffle and kept her silver combs in my hair. I donned her red blouse with beads on the cuffs,and I walked about the farm and even inside the house in my father’s old work boots, the brown ones scuffed and resoled.
    I lit candles and talked to the walls and the spaces in the air, like my family, even my dead siblings, was still there. I brought out the old high chair and set it near the table. I bottled milk and made juice. I cooked the way Mama had with spices of cayenne and mint. I baked bread and dried fruits so that the kitchen felt the same as it always did, hot and fragrant. I spoke to her while I kneaded and worked the dough. I asked questions. I sang lullabies. I called them to myself.
    I took to smoking a pipe like Daddy so that the smell of tobacco, sweet and mild, remained along the edges of windowsills and high in the air above my head. I read stories from his favorite books, and I told him news of the mountain. I rocked in his chair, and I would not let him rest.
    Once I realized that I was responsible for my dead family coming back, that I had asked for the spirits of those who had passed, it was too late because I had made it too easy for them to return and stay. It was all too familiar. I had created a house that was full and prankish, and eventually the dead ones were filling up the rooms and crowding me out.
    I met O.T. when I left the ghost house and went into town one Saturday to sell apples and the herbs I had harvested. He was there with his family sightseeing, visiting the mountains and the Indian reservation. It was late summer, August or September, the afternoons still hot, the sky heavy. He kept coming over to my table, tapping the fruit, rolling them across his fingers, smelling the ginseng, like he knew what he was doing.
    He was handsome, attentive, a tall young man who claimed he wanted to be a soldier. He had dark brown hair and the bluest eyes I had ever seen. He was wearing work pants, denim, that were clean and unfaded. I think they were new.
    He had on a tan shirt that was bordered in a bold black thread, a design of embroidered curls, that edged along the collar. He looked as fancy as a girl; and later I asked him why he was so dressed up. He announced that he was expecting to find me, that he woke up that morning and knew his future wife was waiting for him on that day. So he took a bath and shaved and put on his nicest clothes. And when he saw me, he said, he was certain that I was the one.
    I was not nearly so convinced that we were meant to be together. It didn’t seem to matter about how much faith I had, however, because before I or his mama anddaddy knew it, he was driving almost up to the Tennessee border once a month just to visit me, the one they called “that dark mountain girl who both farmed and lived all by herself.”
    O.T. was easy to talk to in the early months we were together; he was shy and ham-fisted. He made me laugh. He made me feel pretty. He showed off a lot, more than he needed to, since truth be told, I’d have left the mountain with anybody.
    It wasn’t that I hated being alone up there or that things