Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast Read Online Free

it was no use. By the time she left, I was so sleepy I dropped down right by the door. Papa found me there at cockcrow. He never did ask what I was doing, and if he guessed, he never said.
    Little Joshua Greenough was found dead in his crib. The doctor took two days to come over the mountains to pronounce it. By then the garlic around his little bed—to keep him from walking, too—had mixed with death smells. Everybody knew. Even the doctor, and him a city man. It hurt Joshua’s mama and papa sore to do the cutting. But it had to be done.
    The men came to our house that very noon to talk about what had to be. Papa kept shaking his head all through their talking. But even his being preacher didn’t stop them. Once a vampire walks these mountain hollers, there’s nary a house or barn that’s safe. Nighttime is lost time. And no one can afford to lose much stock.
    So they made their sharp sticks out of green wood, the curling shavings littering our cabin floor. Bubba played in them, not understanding. Sukey was busy with the baby, nursing it with a bottle and a sugar teat. It was my job to sweep up the wood curls. They felt slick on one side, bumpy on the other. Like my heart.
    Papa said, “I was the one let her turn into a night walker. It’s my business to stake her out.”
    No one argued. Specially not the Greenoughs, their eyes still red from weeping.
    â€œJust take my children,” Papa said. “And if anything goes wrong, cut off my hands and feet and bury me at Mill’s Cross, under the stone. There’s garlic hanging in the pantry. Mandy Jane will string me some.”
    So Sukey took the baby and Bubba off to the Greenoughs’ house, that seeming the right thing to do, and I stayed the rest of the afternoon with Papa, stringing garlic and pressing more into the windows. But the strand over the door he took down.
    â€œI have to let her in somewhere,” he said. “And this is where I’ll make my stand.” He touched me on the cheek, the first time ever. Papa never has been much for show.
    "Now you run along to the Greenoughs’, Mandy Jane,” he said. “And remember how much your mama loved you. This isn’t her, child. Mama’s gone. Something else has come to take her place. I should have remembered that the Good Book says, ‘The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything.’ ”
    I wanted to ask him how the vampire knew to come first to our house, then; but I was silent, for Papa had been asleep and hadn’t seen her.
    I left without giving him a daughter’s kiss, for his mind was well set on the night’s doing. But I didn’t go down the lane to the Greenoughs’ at all. Wearing my triple strand of garlic, with my cross about my neck, I went to the burying ground, to Mama’s grave.
    It looked so raw against the greening hillside. The dirt was red day, but all it looked like to me was blood. There was no cross on it yet, no stone. That would come in a year. Just a humping, a heaping of red dirt over her coffin, the plain pinewood box hastily made.
    I lay face down in that dirt, my arms opened wide. “Oh, Mama,” I said, “the Good Book says you are not dead but sleepeth. Sleep quietly, Mama, sleep well.” And I sang to her the lullaby she had always sung to me and then to Bubba and would have sung to Baby Ann had she lived to hold her.
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Blacks and bays,
Dapples and grays,
All the pretty little horses.
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    And as I sang I remembered Papa thundering at prayer meeting once, "Behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” The rest of the song just stuck in my throat then, so I turned over on the grave and stared up at the setting sun.
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    It had been a long and wearying day, and I fell asleep right there in the burying ground. Any other time fear might have overcome sleep. But I just dosed my eyes and slept.
    When I woke, it was dead night. The