The Sweet by and By by Todd Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

said I had already done all the work and there wasn’t anyone else at my level. After a few hot days, leftovers from summer, the leaves started to change. I loved seeing a patch of fiery red or shiny yellow in the middle of a thick bunch of pines. The greatest change was about to come in a way that my family would never get over.
    I had been back in school for only about a month, and I was read- ing on my bed before supper. Callie came running into our room, wild-eyed, scared to death. She had dirt on her face and one sleeve of
    her dress was torn so her shoulder showed through, scraped and bleed- ing. “Callie?” I said, sitting up.
    She threw her arms around me, “I didn’t do anything, this is Dad- dy’s farm. I can go wherever I want to, can’t I?”
    “Ardor Lee,” I said. It came to me like daylight. “I didn’t do anything,” she cried.
    “Wait for me. I’m going to get Daddy.” Mother was digging in her vegetable garden by the henhouse and shouted at me when I ran past her to the barn where Daddy always was at the end of the day before supper. When Mother saw us running together back to the house, she dropped her hoe on the ground and ran too.
    The sheriff told Mother and Daddy they had been to every farm around, and that nobody had seen him. Ardor Lee’s house still had ev- erything that belonged to him in it, like he had gone to the outhouse and planned to be back any minute. Daddy said he wanted that shack burned to the ground, and he hired a man and his son to come haul off anything that wouldn’t burn. Callie stayed in our bedroom and wouldn’t come out; I wasn’t allowed to go in either. Mother made me a pallet on the living room f loor to sleep on, and every morning she got whatever clothes I needed and brought them to me.
    I never saw my father look so sad, it was a sadness that would stay on his face for the rest of his life, in lines across his forehead and sunken eyes. He didn’t preach that Sunday or the next. Nothing had to be explained to the congregation. What they didn’t know they figured out. Weeks passed and I had the feeling that our life was different but didn’t know how, it was like we were caught in a place where nothing happens except waiting, and everyone sucks in their breath and holds it, feeling like they might explode. Ardor Lee was gone.
    In the middle of a November morning while I was at school, Mother found Callie lying at the foot of her bed. She had swallowed most of a bottle of poison. They did not let me see her, they thought the way she looked would be too upsetting for me, even after the undertaker got
    her ready to be buried. Daddy insisted on preaching his own daugh- ter’s funeral, even though Mother tried to get him to reconsider. I thought it might be the only thing that would ever make it real to him. Seeing the faces of the people in church told me they weren’t listening to him, but feeling sorry, amazed that he could stand in front of them and talk about the love of God with what his own family had been through. We buried Callie when the leaves were all gone, and not a cloud was overhead, only plain blue sky going on forever. After the funeral, Mother went to bed for a month. She didn’t speak to anybody, including Daddy, and didn’t eat one morsel that I ever saw. Daddy went in every evening and sat with her by the light of a lamp. Sometimes he held her hand and read to her from the Psalms, then he’d leave her and come back into the living room to ask me about my schoolwork, and we would talk for a few minutes before both of us went to bed. There wasn’t anything else to do once it was dark.
    Mother’s grief was a well that dried up so slowly that it eventually became useless to her, meaning that it had run its course and no longer had a purpose. With one of the first frosts of winter on the ground, she got up, bathed and dressed, went to the kitchen, and started cook- ing collards, the most pungent of greens. The whole house smelled