The Last Odd Day by Lynne Hinton Read Free Book Online Page B

hope. It is a name of promise. And for my daughter, when I was planning her life and calling her by name, when I was dreaming my dreams for her, giving her a path to follow, helping her begin, it was everything I could want.

5
    I was awake and up at exactly the moment the snow fell. The TV weather forecasters in North Carolina give reports all night when a winter storm is passing through. And when they’re right and precipitation really does fall, they follow it as it makes its way across the state.
    â€œNotice on the satellite radar how the snow is falling over Tennessee and making its way east. It should be here in the form of sleet or freezing rain in about four hours.” Then they’ll show pictures of a storm from last year and interview the transportation crews to find out which roads they clear first. Next half hour, it’s the same thing.
    They track it like it’s a hungry beast walking toward us, threatening us, bearing down upon us. They make itseem that if we know exactly when it makes its way down our driveway and along our streets, we’ll be safer and more sound than if we were met by surprise. “The snow should fall in the southern piedmont in thirty-seven minutes.” No thief coming in the night here. The television stations will make sure of that.
    I was not out of bed timing the storm. I just happened still to be awake and decided to open the blinds on the front window and check outside. It was 11:51 p.m.
    Even in the dark I could see the heaviness of the clouds. The squeeze and grasp of the atmosphere to hold its breath. The burden of the weight. Clutching, clenching, gripping, it fought to keep itself together. Then finally in the time it takes only to blink one’s eyes, only to be caught off guard, a quick jerk of your head, the clouds burst at the seams and there came a violent release. A bounty of white flecks shaken from the ripped belly of the sky.
    Snowstorms in the mountains, when I was a little girl, were as frequent in the winter as the visits of mice in the storeroom. We expected the ground cover from November to March, sometimes April, to be crunchy and white. And because this is what I was accustomed to, I never thought much about it. Winter was white and brisk and stark. It was just the season, like dogwood flowersand daffodils in the spring, june bugs and squash blooms in the summer, rich golden leaves and dark green moss in the fall.
    Now that I have been away from the mountains and their winters for so long, I am as surprised at the changes in the landscape when a storm rolls through as are the kids who grew up at the beach.
    I never considered the splendor or the shield of the mountains until I left them. And the first five years I was married and away I did not sleep an entire night. I didn’t understand for the longest time why I was restless. But then I realized that I felt exposed, uncovered. I would get up and check all the locks on windows and doors even though O.T. said they had never had a theft or break-in as long as he was alive. I couldn’t help it because I felt bare without the presence of the hills around me. Unprotected and loosed in a way that kept me off center. I missed the boundaries of the Smokies, the edge of the peaks, the mounds of earth that separated me from whatever might bring harm. That’s what I grew up thinking was on the other side.
    I remembered, of course, all the things my mother had told me. I knew the stories of families hiding in the caves, fighting mountain lions and bears for food, the smallpox and pellagra and pneumonia that haunted the bands ofdisplaced Indians trying to find a resting place for their ancestors’ spirits, a home for themselves. I knew about the rampages and the thefts and the burnings.
    I knew then and I know now that evil festered even within the protected place. That Shelly Threehawks was raped by the white deputies. That Lapis Gulley beat his wife and children, leaving marks on