The Healing [antikvár]

1933 CThe winter dampness crept through the kitchen door, chilling ^ Gran Gran through her worn, flour-sack shift. The little girl standing in the doorway had not moved since she first appeared, her gaze fixed on the cot across the room where her mother lay. The room, the kitchen of an old plantation, was immense, and the fire from a claw-footed stove in a far corner cast flickering shadows against walls stained and slick with a century's worth of wood smoke and bacon grease. Dividing the room was a roughly hewn pine table longer than a ship's gangplank, big enough to seat a dozen people and heaped with baskets and gourds, clay pots, syrup buckets. One waU was taken up by a massive fireplace, boarded over. Through the open door the old woman heard the Buick spin its tires fixriously in the mud, finally gain traction, and power off in the direction from which it had come, Memphis the man had said, his load lighter now by one dead woman and her child. "Good news never comes in bad weather," she had predicted when the white man had driven up less than half an hour ago in his fancy car. She had been right about that. Again Gran Gran noticed the dark stains on the girl's baby-blue dress. Violet, they said her name was, just before they had abandoned the girl to her care. With nothing but the clothes on the child's back.