High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney Read Free Book Online Page B

does not feel like getting up at all. Big Mary was told that for Mrs. Harris to gain weight will cause her death. The doctor said this, but that woman is still serving the same fat food.”
    “Isn’t that pitiful.” Aunt Clara liked to keep up, but without the muss of too much contact. Anyone Arnez defended as just being friendly, Aunt Clara condemned for taking liberties, showing
bad manners. Familiarity, on her part, was also Pandora’s Box. If Nida Lee reported that a reverend’s wife had asked after Aunt Clara and thought she might pay a call one of these old days, Aunt Clara looked ready to bar the doors. I pictured Aunt Clara fleeing acquaintances, in case they approached with ticking packages.
    “I told her you were feeling poorly.”
    “I can’t have that woman in my house. Not until I can get Arnez to get a honey dripper to do something about those drainpipes.” Aunt Clara called any man who did yard work a “honey dripper,” though the term hadn’t been current since World War II, and referred specifically to army privates on latrine duty.
    “She’s not coming.”
    “Say what? That woman is a horror story. I don’t know how some people can live so long and not know you’re not supposed to wear hats at night.”
    “She’s not coming. She fell down last week.”
    “She did what?”
    “She hurt herself. She fell down.”
    “She fell . You know I don’t like it when you talk like a linthead.”
    Aunt Clara also liked to hear Arnez’s news: who had been taken away to the nursing home in Columbus, Georgia; whose husband had gone to the store for cigarettes and not been seen for three days; which family had been left property by a branch that passed for white but was too dark to try to claim it; whose daughter had ended up in jail out in Texas.
    “Isn’t that pitiful?”
    “That’s pitiful.”
    “I seen little Johnny and don’t you know his wife is going to lose that kidney.”
    “Say what?”
    Nida Lee didn’t like it when Arnez had some news that particularly interested Aunt Clara. Not to be undone, she pulled terrifically huge rabbits out of her hat. My sisters called them Pitiful Contests. Nida Lee reminded Aunt Clara that it was almost four years to the day that some poor widow’s three grandsons were killed on the same day, two in Tulsa, one on the highway. “Now that was pitiful.”
    By the end of the first week my stomach was a muddle of cream, lime sherbert, butternut squash, and grits. “Child, you don’t know what’s good,” Arnez said. My palms began to stink of violets, furniture polish, ammonia, and a varnish that seemed to coat Aunt Clara’s whole life and protect her from the effects of time.
    I heard, at night, the windows fall on their rope pulleys; someone on the catwalk; my sisters’ accounts of haints in the woods, of Nida Lee’s voodoo potions, her nine lumps of starch moistened with Jockey cologne; and Aunt Clara playing scratched Angel recordings alone in her room, tallying up the pieces of a Scrabble game to determine which letters she should order.
     
    “Why you want to go and tell a lie on my sister.” I heard Arnez with Nida Lee in the kitchen. Muriel was in disgrace. Nida Lee had told Aunt Clara that Muriel was stealing. Muriel admitted with copious tears that she took things, food mostly, down to the men working on the other side of the creek. Otherwise, she just wanted to show them things. She always brought them back.
    I’d followed her and her covered dishes by the shotgun cabins with TV antennas. Her courage expressed itself in her not hiding her head under a hat or a scarf. She sewed extra ribbons on her dress when she went “out to the road” or “down under the hill” and picked at the thread until they dropped off one by one.
    The men hadn’t seemed very interested in Muriel’s show-and-tell. They politely took the food and went back to joking among themselves. She waited around, her face taut, looking for a way into their afternoon