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cancer spreading again.”
Did they even know about cancer
I regret to say I have grave and sorrowful news to impart. My dear Rebecca passed away last January. She died of a malignant influenza soon after our return to Philadelphia.
Go north. The voice broke into my small oblivion, dropping like a dark, beautiful stone. I caught my breath. It was not like a common thought—it was distinct, shimmering, and dense with God. Go north.
Enough w this religious aspect
Father had left all his properties and the vast share of his wealth to his sons, but he hadn’t forgotten his daughters. He’d left us each ten thousand dollars,
How does one know the voice is God’s? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?
Yeah
megalithic
?
I think God brought you here.” I looked away from him toward the pond blotched with pollen and silt, the water bronzing in the shrinking light. When I looked back, he pulled me to him and held me against his chest, and I felt it was me he held, not his Rebecca.
Her beaux didn’t last long, though. Missus said she chased them off with her opinionating. I don’t know why she didn’t chase the girls off either.
Le$bean
My enchantment turned to slush about the same time the snow did. We seemed stuck in a perpetual twilight. Color bled from the world, recasting the landscape into gradations of black and white, and no matter how ruthlessly the fireplaces roared, cold formed on my Charleston bones like hoarfrost.
when I looked at Israel, he had that yearning expression again, the sad, burning smile, and he dared to slide his little finger across the cloth and hook it about mine. It was a small thing, our fingers wrapped like vines, but the intimacy of it flooded me, and I caught my breath. The sound made Catherine turn her head and peer at us over her shoulder. Israel snatched his finger from mine. Or did I snatch mine from his? She leveled her eyes on him. “So, it is as I suspected.” “This is not your business,” he told her. Getting to his feet, he smiled regretfully at me and walked back up the hill.
He leaves sarah to deal w her
sorry. I should’ve spoken in the meeting. I was wrong not to. What Catherine did was unpardonable—I’ve told her as much. I’ll go before the elders this week and make it clear I don’t wish you to leave.” His eyes gleamed with what I took to be anguish. “. . . It’s too late, Israel.” “But it isn’t. I can make them understand—” “No!”
I opened the chest where the drum had leaned and there must’ve been ten bullet molds inside. I pulled out two, slow so they wouldn’t clink, and stuck them in my basket under the rags. Then I swept the air clean of cobwebs and wiped down the gun racks with oil. When I had the place good as Hilde would’ve done it, I gathered my stuff and tapped on the door. “Don’t forget the latrine,” the guard at the door said, thumbing toward the rear of the Arsenal. I headed back there, but I walked right past it and kept going.
soughing
?
Residents were already fortifying their fence tops with broken bottles until permanent iron spikes could be installed. The chevaux-de-frise would soon encircle the most elegant homes like ornamental armor.
When I opened the quilt so I could burn the list, I counted two hundred eighty-three names on it, not six thousand like he’d said.
She can count?
me at Meeting, something he never failed to do. Nor did he fail in his visits to me, coming twice each month to call on me in the Motts’ parlor. I looked at him now and wondered how we’d gotten ourselves stranded on this endless plateau of friendship. One
“God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know that’s men’s doing.”
As I write you now, it sits beside the inkwell, reminding me of the destiny I always believed was inside of me, waiting. How can I explain such a thing? I simply know it the way I know there’s an oak tree inside an acorn. I’ve been filled with a hunger to grow this seed my whole life.
Shut up!!!
exigency
?
. . I want to say yes . . . and yet, as you know, I’ve set my course for a vocation. The ministry . . . What I mean to say is . . . could I be your wife and a minister?” His eyes widened. “I hadn’t imagined you would want to continue with your ambition after we married. Would you really want that?” “I would. With all my heart.” His face furrowed. “Forgive me, I only thought you chose it because you’d given up on me.”
Ew
“Wouldn’t I, wouldn’t we be enough for you?” he said. “You would be a wonderful wife and the best of mothers. We would see to it that you never missed your ambition.” It was his way of telling me. I could not have him and myself both.
Boy bye
Just before I went over, I heard mauma say, “I don’t spec to get free. The only way I’m getting free is for you to get free.”
By the second week we were bored. Sarah Mapps had said we should be careful to conceal our comings and goings, that the neighbors would not tolerate racial mixing, but slipping out one day, we were spotted by a group of ruffian boys, who pelted us with pebbles and slurs. Amalgamators. Amalgamators. The next day the front of the house was egged. The third week we became hermits.
