WAKE ME UP BEFORE I DIE by Kennedy Brazier (books for 8th graders TXT) 📖

next to Chugs, and impulsively he reached up to find comfort in him and began to trustingly hold the hand of the strange man who had instantly become the only friend who he had in the world.

He didn’t know who the man was, but now he felt relief in the puffy hand he had loathed only moments before, as Chugs gently squeezed Johnny’s fingers inside of his own.

“Go on with him.--Get him outta my face, for now.” She finally said fanning her hand, as if she was shooing away an insect.

“Ya"ll gonna make me late for Church this morning,” she said placing a pearl stick pin in the hat on her head and adjusting it in front of the wall mirror.

“Charlie, hand me my pocket book from off of the table, and put that boy in the workers changing room. -I’ll figure out what to do with him later.”

—She stretched her white gloves over her hands, and then swept the brim of her hat with her finger tips, satisfied with her finished appearance.

“Oh and Charlie, -- We don’t know nothin bout this here youngin’. He could come in here and try and take anything- and then just run away back to his momma. –So you make sure you keep a good eye on him while I’m gone.” She pointed her gloved finger at Johnny with warning as she spoke and then snatched the purse out of Chugs’ hands and with the bang of the grand oak door, Isabelle Lureaux, Johnny’s grandmother, was gone for the moment.

Chugs looked down at Johnny again, still holding his tiny hand.

“I guess it’s me and you buddy…. Now don’t you be bothered with all of her yellin. That’s just Aunt Izzy.  I think she’s gonna get betta when she comes to know you.—She’s just gettin old and mean, that’s all.—She ain’t raised no little one as  yourself, in a long time, but don’t you fret, okay?” he said, feeling sorry for his new little cousin after the harsh words from his Aunt.

 

He sighed in disgust, as he looked further down at Johnny. Johnny’s dingy feet were striped now with streaks of urine that formed a puddle around him on the wooden floor, he had wet himself through the harsh interrogation from his Grandmother.

“Boy we gotta get that mess up before Aunt Izzy come back and raise hell!” he said, already frustrated. –“Aunt Izzy is worse than a butchered chicken in the slaughter yard, when she get too mad –and she can be wild sometimes and mad as hell!” he said almost laughing to himself.

Although he undertook various jobs as the nephew and the caretaker for his surely Aunt, at 17 years old Charlie, (Chugs) Lureaux knew nothing about children.

He lifted the toddler up, holding Johnny underneath each of his tiny arms, and away from himself, making sure that the urine covered clothing would not his own.  Johnny dangled in the air in front of him, as Chugs walked outside and then behind the house, passing a large garden with neat and attended rows of various fresh vegetables.  He and Johnny turned on the side of the house passing a red barn and pigs, chickens and cows that were fenced in separate areas around the bard. 

Before Johnny’s eyes could study all of the new things around him, Chugs stopped at a small, freshly painted white out-house standing amongst some short rounded and scarcely-stemmed bushes. He let Johnny stand back upon his own feet and then made Johnny remove his wet pants and afterwards Chugs laid the wet pants on top of a nearby bush.  “This here is where you relieve yourself next time you gotta pee or poop,” he said opening the small shack door. The opening revealed a square wooden box with a large hole in the center of it.  It reeked of old urine and feces.  Johnny hesitated and Chugs, brushed his hand behind Johnny’s shoulder to encourage him to go in.  “It’s alright, - go on in.  I’mma be back when the workers come in to help me clean your pants. Now go ahead in….It’s alright.” He said, pushing Johnny from behind lightly.  “Just relax and do what you needs to do in here and somebody will be back to help you get dressed again soon, ok?

Johnny stood still, not answering him, his eyes clouding again, as he looked at Chugs in silence, closing the door slowly and leaving him standing there.

Chugs walked in to the house and back into his Aunts large kitchen.  He was relieved as he remembered the house aides would be in soon to assist him with the new child in the home. He placed more wood in the bottom of the Glenwood cast-iron stove in his Aunts kitchen to warm up the briskly large house and to heat up the plate of breakfast that sat on top of the stove.

And as Johnny remained in the grisly shed, the sun peeped through the cracks of the old roof over his head and he gazed up at the warmth over him, trying to take in the abrupt changes that had crushed his Sunday morning. A faint scent of smoked ham trickled into the outhouse, helping to override the stench inside for a moment, but it didn’t dismiss the questions running through Johnny’s mind.

He didn’t understand who these people were or why his mother had awakened him and removed him from the routine of her comforting lap in Church each Sunday into the hollow walls of a dark shed. He didn’t understand why she left him there, in a big scary house with strangers who didn’t like him. He wanted to run back home the same way he had come, and he cried, longing to chase his mother down the road she departed on.

But now the fear inside of him destroyed all hopes of escaping to reunite with her, and somehow the love that once burned for his mother became cold with anger as he thought of her leaving him in this place alone.

Isolated and clad only in his shirt, he glanced around the stagnant retreat and noticed a tiny field mouse coming through a crack on the far side of the wall. He watched it as it made its way into the small shack and sniffed around. It entertained his kindergarten mind for a moment, snooping around the crevices of the hut, until it escaped back into the hole it had arrived through. As it disappeared, Johnny wished he could be a mouse and escape through a hole. He wanted to leave like the mouse did and runaway from everything, but unable to, his anger returned.

He kicked into the air, jealously, toward the deserted hole; his little bare feet even cooler than before, still covered in the now dry and dingy urine. He was angry at the mouse, something so irrelevant to come and go as it pleased; angry that something so tiny could get away from a bad place, -why couldn’t he?  Johnny returned to the grimness of his own desertion, still alone and half- naked in the small shack. He grew even more frightened as he anticipated Chugs’ long awaited return.

But it was Sunday. There would be no arrival of the house aides; it was the only day Isabelle Lureaux allowed the staff to take off. Chugs lay comfortable across the sofa as the warmth from the kitchen oven had reached the living room. After eating the grits and ham and buttermilk biscuits his Aunt had cooked for breakfast he flipped through the pages of a pin-up girl calendar he had taken out his younger brother Bobbie’s room. His eyes moved up and down each page slowly, intoxicated in the seductive photos. 

As drool slowly ran down the side of his opened mouth; Miss Marvelous March, lay before him.  Her creamy ivory skin glowed from the page as her red hair flowed over the back of her flawless body and she held her head back to accentuate the perfect breast peeping from beneath her gold satin corset.  Her long legs covered with fish-net stockings opened slowly as she smiled back at him in his dreams.  Chugs closed his eyes in giddiness and as his alluring dream moved into a sensual slumber, he began snoring. The little boy out back was far from his mind.

Johnny, shivered inside the dark outhouse and leaned in the corner closest to the door, anticipating the sounds of the big man's return, yet afraid to leave.   But as he listened to the distant sounds of the Southern Baptist Church Bells ringing as they filled with patrons, box cars clanging past the tracks far away, and the animals grunts and clucks from behind him in the barn, he heard no one approaching the shed. He realized that he was there all alone.

 He hated his mother and now the person she left him with was nowhere around and he wasn’t sure when the big man would be back! His teeth shattered, clanging like metal in his small mouth.  He tried to focus again on the light penetrating through the wooden roof above him. He wanted his mother, in spite of it all, he hated her, but he wanted and needed his mother.

He crossed his arms and wrapped his tiny hands around his shoulders and hopelessly, slowly, slid his back down against the wall and squatted onto the floor. The hardened red dirt was cold beneath him, as he hesitantly met the ground with his bare bottom surrendering to the surrounding doom. In the dimness, he sat with his knees to his chest, and rocked back and forth as he continued to stare upon the seeping sun through the cracks of the roof.

The streaks of morning sun had lowered from the roof, resting into the early afternoon, shadowing the bottom of the wall and by now Johnny’s measly body began to shake uncontrollably. Unable to stop as the convulsions overtook his tiny muscles, he instinctively pulled up the white shirt he wore and stuffed it between his chattering teeth.

At three years old, on a chilly February day, in Selma, Alabama, Johnny Lureaux, was having an ecliptic seizure. For the first time in his young life, as death made its introduction, into the hollow empty, bathroom hut, and into his small body, he could feel the intrusion of a cold darkness in his soul as he fought to stay alive.

The cool shivers became heated as Johnny saw flickers of the sun running through his mind. Sweat blistered across his forehead in the cool shack as gleams of superficial light interrupted the blackness overtaking his soul. He jerked across the Alabama dirt, opposing the affliction gaining control throughout him; unable to stop the pain from the wooden floor beating his convulsing body with each wild buck. He fought for his life, with everything from inside of him; he battled the invisible force.  And soon, his little heart began beating strongly again; rising to normality from a fainting murmur, eager to a new life awaiting him.

A new life indeed; a life that wouldn’t meet any of the hopes he awakened for, or answer his prayers to be in his mother’s care again. He would no longer be a son to a mother, and although he heard the word “bastard” before, for the very first time, as Johnny slowly regained full consciousness in the darkness of an outhouse, he actually felt what it was to be treated like one.