One Blood by Denene Millner EPUB & PDF

One Blood by Denene Millner EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: Denene Millner
• Language: English
• Genre: Historical Fiction 
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 2 MB
• Price: Free

The blood never much bothered Grace. Maw Maw Rubelle got her used to
it early on, when she was little ol’, way before she let her only
granddaughter, her apprentice, tend the stove at her first baby catching—
before, even, Grace’s first blood trickled down her thigh. There it was, her
monthly making a dark red liquid trail past her calf and ankle, dripping into
the thick, fertile Virginia dirt she’d planted her feet in as she reached for the
pins on the laundry line. Grace cocked her head and stared at it in wonder
for just a moment, then went on in the outhouse and made her sanitary pad,
just like Maw Maw Rubelle had taught her to do with the pins and ripped
pieces of feed sack. Just as natural and nasty as slopping hogs, Grace
thought.

Now her best friend, Cheryl, she didn’t see it that way. She cried holy
hell when her blood came in. Nobody—not her mama, not her big sissy, not
nan auntie—bothered to tell her what was inevitable. They held it to their
chests like a big secret Cheryl had no right to know. She near killed her fool
self when she saw the red puddle on her little piece of school bench and
realized it was oozing from her poom-poom—knocked over the desk,
tripped down the rickety schoolhouse steps, and just took off running down
toward Harley pasture, hollering and screaming like a stuck pig, the
laughter of the boys and the screams of Ms. Garvey, their school teacher,
chasing behind her.

But Grace, she understood the power of the blood. Maw Maw Rubelle
saw to that—made her look straight at it for sport and for practicality’s
sake. Maw Maw knew, after all, that her grandbaby would have the calling
—saw it in a vision just as plain as day one afternoon as she pulled poke
sallet roots from the ground deep in the woods down by the river, where she
had gone to forage and be still and make offerings to the spirits of her
mother and her mother before that. In the vision, there’d been Grace’s
hands—small, delicate, strong—gently twisting, pulling a baby’s head as it
emerged between its mother’s legs.

The movements, the way Grace’s
fingers fluttered about the infant’s curls, had made Maw Maw’s heart beat
fast. She could feel her granddaughter’s happy in the tingle of her own
fingertips, in each of her own palms. Maw Maw had slowly fallen to her
knees, sticks and pebbles digging into the thick of her skirt; she’d kissed
those palms, and pressed them—warm, pulsing with energy—to her cheeks.
Love was there. Grace would continue in the tradition of the Adams
women. Maw Maw’s dead did not lie. Show her the blood, they’d
whispered in the breeze, in the beams of light rushing through the leaves.
Show her what she already knows.

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