Shaman's Blood Read Online Free Page B

room. She’s been dead quite a few years, but I don’t s’pose she’d mind you using it,” he said softly. “You lie back. I’ll check on you when it’s suppertime.”
    Ned slumped back on the pillows, sweating, his mind churning. He’d expected to die, but now he’d been rescued. He’d never interacted much with black people, and the few who’d come to his mother for her services had been either shaking in their worn-out boots while the witch mixed her potions or dangerous as the snakes that fueled the brew. In any case, he knew he couldn’t stay.
     
    *   *   *
     
    “So, what’re we gonna do with that white boy? He can’t stay here without it causing trouble.” Estell looked at her husband in the fading light. They were sitting on the front steps of the small frame house the congregation of St. Christopher’s had built for Cecil’s father and his extended family back in 1925 when Cecil was in middle school. Now, half-a-dozen years after the second world war, Cecil’s father had passed on, leaving the church and the house to his son, who lived in it with just his wife. They were hoping for children, had been hoping for nearly a decade, but so far the field had proved infertile.
    Cecil took her hand. “Why? He’s homeless and from what he says, motherless and fatherless. You want to just turn him out?”
    “Find some whites who’ll take him in. Ask up at the Methodist Church, they’ll find somebody. Or maybe a schoolteacher knows him. I just don’t want any trouble.”
    Cecil sat with bowed head. “It doesn’t feel right, after he was sent to us half-dead.”
    “Brought to us, if I remember rightly. Don’t act like a darn fool. We can’t adopt him, and how do you know he’s really an orphan? He could be a runaway, just as easy. It’ll be Hell to pay, us keepin’ him.” She was frowning, keeping her voice down. “You know I’m right.”
    Cecil continued to stare at the tops of his shoes. He sighed deeply. “I’ll ask around. At least let’s feed him a good supper. He seems like a nice boy.”
    Estell looked her husband in the eyes. “Don’t you go getting attached to him, you hear me? I know you—take in every stray dog that wanders into the yard. This ain’t your stray dog. He belongs to somebody else, and we can’t keep him.”
    “All right, I agree. Satisfied?”
    “Yes.” She pecked him on the cheek and stood up, fanning herself with a magazine. “Now I’ll go start dinner. This summer sure is a scorcher.” 
    Cecil sat, chin in hand, wondering why he felt so unsettled. She was right, of course. Although some brave souls had recently tried protesting the segregation of the races in schools and public places, it wasn’t a crusade he wanted to jump into. Last year he’d read in the paper about that little girl Linda Brown in Topeka, Kansas, whose case had been taken to court by the NAACP. But Kansas was a long way from Magnolia, Florida. A childless black couple taking in a homeless white teenager ... it wouldn’t be tolerated. The Klan didn’t seem all that visible in this quiet rural community, but he didn’t want to test that assumption.
    Cecil sighed again and stood up. At forty, he was well respected in the colored community and on friendly terms with some open-minded whites as well, but he was not like his father. Antoine Rider, the late pastor of St. Christopher’s, had been courageous in life and a source of strength to his flock and family even after his death. Cecil missed him still. He wished his father was here now, to give guidance. He’d looked long and hard into the eyes of that skinny child lodged in his grandmother’s room, and he wasn’t at all happy with what he saw. The boy was lying, of course, concealing his real situation. But there was something else … something in his eyes and sharp-boned face that gave Cecil a start every time the boy looked at him. It was unsettling, like feeling anxiety or dread over something you couldn’t