Free GodPretty in the Tobacco Field by Kim Michele Richardson Page B

reading them in his room, too, because I’d catch him chuckling late at night when he said he was turning in early to brush up on The Good Word . In the morning, I’d make his bed and find one of Cobb’s books shoved under a tossed blanket.
    â€œGunnar, I like to read funny stuff, too, different stuff, and my teacher said all reading makes you smart and—”
    Pinking, Gunnar smacked the table with his open hand. “You’ll not read trash and you’ll not use good paper on trash.”
    He slammed the jar of bitters down onto the table. And like always when his hands went smacking and thumping, I knew trouble was coming. I shrank back, and he grabbed my arm and shoved me into the kitchen chair.
    I covered my jaws with my hands. “My . . . Gunnar, no, my jaws are still burning from the last time,” I said, shaking. “It’ll eat a hole in my tongue—”
    â€œHope to God it’ll nip the sass in it this time.”
    â€œM-my teacher says my art is good, and I’m going to take it to the city one day—”
    â€œArt . . . ?” he snickered, shaking his head. “Is that what you call those damn fortunes you make, all about who’s going to kiss whom and far worse? You’re going to end up like your snake-charmer pa if you’re not careful.”
    â€œI’m going to end up far away from you,” I lashed back.
    I hated when he talked like that. My daddy weren’t no snake charmer. He was a good preacher, folks had said, and despite Gunnar telling me he was a drunk.
    My daddy was smart enough to make snakes lie down quiet. I pushed back the squeaking thoughts that said otherwise. Why couldn’t he have done the same with his demons?

Chapter 8
    I dyll days of August brought no peace to my bone-jumping demons. Nightmares of babies wouldn’t stop. And the idea of Rainey leaving me here alone in the tobaccos was more than I could stand. The notion of him coming back wounded or worse, unbearable.
    Evenings, I stretched the daylight into dark, escaping the bad dreams by working on my sketches, drawing cities and everything I imagined there. I studied book covers and thought about the piles of books I’d pored through in the back of Rose’s truck. One morning I got up the nerve to show Gunnar my new drawings. I thought if he saw them on Rose’s official artist pad, he might soften some, maybe even like them a little. But he’d pushed me away, calling them ugly, and I turned back to the fortune-tellers.
    When I was sure Gunnar was asleep, I stole downstairs into the sitting room to get the tobacco paper for the fortunes.
    Tonight, I eased open Gunnar’s secretary drawer again. I looked over my shoulder at the tall bookcase beside the fireplace. Gunnar loved to see me reading, as long as it was the Bible or what he thought I should be reading. He called himself a learned man after getting one year of college in before his mama passed—the doing that brought him back to Nameless.
    I snatched sheets of the tobacco paper out of his secretary, pressed them to my face, inhaling. Old man Graydon Turner made the paper for us once a year, pulping some of Gunnar’s tobacco stalks to produce it. He’d let me watch him once and then gave me a stack of my very own, despite Gunnar objecting and saying it would be wasteful for my silly drawings.
    We’d gone into Mr. Turner’s barn and watched him chop up the stalks and mix it all into a huge vat. He cooked it like soup, stirring, fussing over it. After, he would strain dirt off the stock, then mixed in a little bleach to whiten and some starch to size. He poured the mixture into large screened pans where he let it dry with a woodstove and fans. Mr. Turner delivered the first rolled-up batch to Gunnar and sold the rest to the Feed & Seed. I loved the light brown speckled paper, its rich pipe tobacco smell.
    I tiptoed back up to my room and snipped out a square to make