Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel by Fannie Flagg Read Free Book Online Page A

here called the Blue Gardenia Lounge that’s going to have live acts. Daddy and I went up to meet the owners, a man named Harold Pistal and his brother, Claude. We only met Harold and his wife, though, because Claude is in Detroit. They have a little girl named Angel, who is five.
    Angel has real big ears that stick way out. When the season starts, Mr. and Mrs. Pistal have promised to pay me twenty-five cents a night to come up and tape her ears back before she goes to sleep. They will be busy working in the lounge and can’t do it. I can see all the acts for free, too. Angel is OK for a small child, even if she does get confused about how old I am and says “Yes, ma’am” to me a lot.
    All the beach balls, inner tubes and floats that we ordered have come. I have to go and blow them up.
June 6, 1952
    Momma got scared and called the doctor again. I didn’t have polio, just hyperventilation from blowing up all those inner tubes. Daddy is going to buy a bicycle pump.
    Mr. Romeo brought Michael over to meet me when I was sick, and he is great! I was sorry my face was so red. Michael is going to take me crabbing and fishing and everything. He is a junior lifeguard, which will come in handy since I can’t swim. He already has a suntan, but it might be his natural color.
    Yesterday Connie, the Sunshine bread truck man, let Michael and me ride to Cotton Bayou to a grocery store where he had to deliver bread. Connie gives Michael all the day-old doughnuts and saves me some, too.
    Cotton Bayou is way down in the swamps. The people there are Cajuns. That means French and something. The bayou is real beautiful, lots of pine trees and sand. There was someone Connie wanted us to meet. We drove up to an old white wooden grocery store that was falling down. It had a sign on it, “Cotton Bayou Grocery and P.O.” It didn’t look to me as if anybody lived there at all, but Connie told us there were a lot of people way back in the bayou that you never see. A mailman delivers their mail in a boat once a week. I would hate to be waiting on a letter for a week. What if the boat sank, or an alligator got the mailman?
    The inside of that grocery store was so old it looked to me that those cans of peppers from Cuba and all kinds of funny foods had been there for a long time. Mrs. LeGore ran the place and was the postmistress. She must be a Cajun because she talked funny. I bought a strawberry drink from her and a Buddy bar. Michael had already eaten six day-old doughnuts, so he just had an RC.
    Connie asked if we could see Jessie. Mrs. LeGore said for us to wait until she had cleaned him up a little. I wanted to know if Jessie was a person or an animal. Connie said that Jessiewas a person about twenty-five years old who hadn’t been out of his room since he was fifteen because of elephantiasis. I had never seen anyone with elephantiasis, and neither had Michael. I was willing to go back there only if I couldn’t catch it.
    We waited a long time. Mrs. LeGore had over a dozen old calendars on the walls and she must have sold a lot of chewing tobacco because there was a bunch of it. She even sold tobacco in a bag with papers if you wanted to roll your own.
    I didn’t finish my Buddy bar. It was too stale. Pretty soon Mrs. LeGore came back in. Connie picked out five loaves of bread and three day-old coconut cakes for Jessie. We went in the back of the store and there was Jessie, lying on a mattress on the floor, with one leg propped up. He must be the fattest man in the world. I couldn’t even see his eyes good. His momma had wet his hair and combed it down for him. He was wearing a flowered shirt without buttons that was fastened together with big safety pins, and he had on what looked to me like pajama bottoms. He was friendly and glad to get the cakes and ate them without a knife or fork. His room was little, and there was a collection of red and blue satin pillows that said “Mother” and “Sweetheart” on them with yellow silk