Gone Crazy in Alabama (4 page)

Who needed a rooster in the morning when the Alabama sun rose early and bright to ruin my plans of sleeping until noon? It wasn't yet six o'clock but my eyes were fully open, my mind too far from dreaminess to be pulled back into sleep. Not that Big Ma would let me sleep late. Pa had told Big Ma over the phone to let us run around and have fun and to not work us half to death, even though I knew Big Ma had a special chore waiting for me. Sooner or later, I'd have to face it.

I tried to lie around but neither my mind nor body would cooperate. I sat up.

Vonetta and Fern slept at opposite ends of their twin bed, their mouths wide open as they snored into each
other's feet. They were still worn out from a day and a half of bumping along on the Greyhound. I couldn't imagine that either of my sisters' legs, backs, and rumps ached more than mine. They couldn't have needed to stretch more than I did through those nine hundred miles—although Vonetta's legs were growing longer. But not as long as mine.

I tiptoed out of our room, and then past Big Ma and Ma Charles, who shared a bedroom, even though Mr. Lucas had added on a large bedroom in the back for Big Ma as well as the bathroom.

There weren't any coffee smells to fill the morning air, which meant no one was awake to ask me to do things. Although Pa didn't intend for me to work hard, Big Ma had been promising to hand down the task of ironing Ma Charles's bedsheets to me since the last time we came south. Ma Charles had her own peculiarities and didn't sleep on wrinkled sheets. My great-grandmother's bedsheets had to be white, cotton, and lightly pressed with lavender-scented Argo starch. No matter how hot it got, Big Ma had to iron white cotton sheets with light starch. “Just you wait,” Big Ma said when I was nine, mopping her wet brow. “This will be your special job when you all come down here next.” I grew to hate the sight of white sheets.

I unlocked and opened the screen door gently to step out onto the back porch without it creaking.

Not only had Ma Charles's house grown, but the henhouse and the chicken run had also expanded. For one thing, we had more chickens. A little more than a dozen. The henhouse wasn't the small, red painted box I remembered, but was now large enough to enter standing fully upright. The new chicken run was made to give the chickens room to spread out. The house, the dog, the pecan tree, the henhouse, and the chicken run had all sprung up or spread outward. They didn't
seem
bigger. They
were
bigger.

I went to unlatch the lock to the henhouse but it was already undone, the door cracked ajar. The smell of straw, chicken feathers, and chicken droppings rose up to my nose. I peered through the opening without entering, although I knew that wiry scarecrow form, stooped over the row of hens squatting in small dresser drawer–like boxes. The hens didn't even stir when he took their eggs. He had an easy way about him. His back was to me but he didn't bother to turn around. He didn't have to. I knew he heard me or felt my shadow in the door crack, just like I knew he was smiling. He placed an egg in his basket and straightened up.

“Hey, Cousin Del.”

I opened the door wide and he came to greet me. I was so happy to see him, I couldn't stop grinning. JimmyTrotter was three years older than me but we'd always been the same height. Now, he'd shot past me and was as tall as Pa and Uncle Darnell.

“It could have been Big Ma, Ma Charles, or Uncle D. How'd you know it was me?”

“You're a country girl at heart. Up with the sun.”

“Not me,” I said. “I'd sleep all day long if I could.”

He placed the basket of eggs down on the straw-covered ground and gave me a good and proper hug, and then he dug his knuckle on top of my head to show me he was taller, in case I hadn't noticed. Then I knuckled him in the rib to show him I was from Brooklyn and didn't take any mess from a country boy, older cousin or not.

Cousin JimmyTrotter. At school and on paper his name was a properly spaced James Trotter. At home among family was another story altogether. For reasons that had more to do with his great-grandmother and mine, he answered to “JimmyTrotter.” No space in between.

I couldn't imagine dragging my last name with me from sunup to sundown, but JimmyTrotter and his great-grandmother wouldn't have it any other way. I'd tried to give my cousin a shorter, tougher, Brooklyn-styled nickname, JT. He'd said firmly without his good-natured ease, “You can call me cuz or cousin. Whichever. But call me JimmyTrotter or don't call me.” And he meant it.

We pulled apart from each other, laughing.

“Your grandmother said you and your sisters were coming down. It was all she talked about for weeks.”

Good to know we were wanted! But to my cousin I said, “Well, we made it,” like the journey was nothing.

“You sure did.” He looked me up and down and said, “How'd you get so pretty so fast, cuz? Thought it would take at least another five or six years.”

I hated myself for blushing. That compliment made him seem much older, like he was giving a penny candy to an anxious little kid. I played it off by changing the subject. “Look at all these chickens! At least fourteen hens.” I went inside the small, dark room.

“Sixteen,” he said. “The reds are Aunt Naomi's. The light browns . . . well, they
were
Mr. Lucas's.” It was always weird to hear him call Ma Charles “Aunt Naomi” and Big Ma “Aunt Ophelia” and even weirder to remember they had names of their own, although I never used them.

“He sold them to Ma Charles?”

“Sold. Gave. The girls all get along and the eggs keep coming. And if chicken is on the menu, Mr. Lucas makes a run to the chicken and feed store for replacements. All girls, of course.” He thumped me on the shoulder. “Pick up a basket and help me, unless you don't know how.”

“I know my way around a coop,” I said, although I didn't really want to stick my hands beneath any feathered chicken butts.

JimmyTrotter wouldn't let me forget the eggs I dropped and cracked when I was nine. “If you crack 'em, they're your breakfast eggs.”

“Not hardly.”

Maybe my hands were cold but the hen began to flap when I reached for her egg.

“Easy, easy, cuz.” He shook his head, like,
Sure, you know your way around a coop
. JimmyTrotter reminded me of Pa, and he resembled the photograph of Grandpa Louis Gaither that Big Ma kept on her dresser too much to not be a Gaither. And he was both Hershey's brown and clay red and too good-looking to be my cousin. I felt myself blushing.

“Now that we're here I'll bet you're glad you don't have to be up to bring the milk
and
collect the eggs.”

“You'd be wrong about that, cuz.”

I gave him
Say what?
eyebrows and he smiled, knowing what I didn't know.

“Stick around, cuz. It's actually fun.”

“Fun?”

“Or funny,” he said. “Not the cows or the chickens. Miss Trotter and Aunt Naomi.”

Our great-grandmothers, Ruth and Naomi Trotter.

“Oh, really?”

“Keep your ears open, cuz. You'll catch on.”

“Why not just tell me what's going on?”

“Gotta have my fun,” JimmyTrotter said. “There's an art to doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Giving them just enough of what they want but not too much.”

“Enough what?” I asked.

“I'll give you a day or two. You'll catch on.”

Even though my cousin was bent on flaunting his age and height over me, I relished the time I spent with him apart from my sisters. What a difference three years made between us. We could barely stand each other at nine and twelve. Now he was practically a grown man. Sitting on the back porch yapping with my fifteen-year-old cousin made me feel like the teenager I'd soon be in October.

We could both smell coffee brewing in the kitchen. The house was waking up. He gave my shoulder a light tap instead of a thump and said, “Let's go inside.”

Soon there would be noise and chores and a mountain of white sheets with my name on them to wash,
hang dry, and iron. I wasn't looking forward to it but I went in with him.

Vonetta and Fern came alive at the table the minute they saw Cousin JimmyTrotter.

“Straight from Sophie,” he said, placing a heavy quart bottle of milk on the kitchen table. I carried the basket full of small brown and white eggs.

“Who's Sophie?” Fern asked, but no one answered.

“Cold milk!” Vonetta cried. “In time for cornflakes!”

“Cornflakes?” Ma Charles said. “Cornflakes won't put meat on those bony bones.” She turned to Big Ma and said, “Daughter, stir those grits up right. Extra hunk of butter—good butter from McDaniels's farm,” she felt the need to add. “And bring out the ham and biscuits. These gals have been starving. See how they've wasted away.”

Vonetta said, “I want cornflakes. Great-grandma Charles, I know you have them.”

“And I don't want ham,” Fern whined.

Big Ma said, “That's not how I raised you two—telling your elders what you want and don't want. Just as unmannerly as a seal on strike at the circus.”

“May I please have lots of milk with my cornflakes?” It was too fake and sweet for Vonetta.

“If that's how you want to waste away, it's all right with me,” Ma Charles said.

“Yes, ma'am, thank you, ma'am.” Fern called up all
the southern talk she knew. “I'll waste away on milk and cornflakes too. But please, ma'am, more cornflakes than milk and no thank you, ma'am, to pig ham.”

Big Ma said we would cause her slow and unmerciful death, but we knew she didn't mean it.

Vonetta took the thick bottle of milk with both hands. “Why is it so warm?” she asked. “Milk's supposed to be cold.”

“Like I said, cuz. It's straight from Sophie,” JimmyTrotter said.

“Who's Sophie?” Fern asked again, but no one answered.

Vonetta pruned up her face. “Straight from Sophie. That sounds nasty.”

“Where do you think milk comes from?” I asked her.

“The store. In a red and white carton.”

“With a picture of a cow on a farm,” Fern said.

“That farm's across the creek,” JimmyTrotter said. “That cow is Sophie. And in a month, that milk'll come from Butter.”

“That makes no sense,” Vonetta said. “Everyone knows butter comes from milk, not the other way around.”

“You tell him!” Ma Charles said.

Vonetta went on. “As long as I can have my cornflakes, I'll take the milk straight from the cow. Just get here sooner and stick the bottle in the freezer.”

I was ready to kick Vonetta under the table but Big Ma told her to watch herself. JimmyTrotter laughed his head
off and told her she was funny and cute.

“As long as—” Fern started to follow Vonetta, but stopped herself. “Cousin JimmyTrotter. Is it all right with Sophie? Us drinking her milk?”

“It sure is, cuz.” He answered so easily she had no choice but to believe him.

Ma Charles shook her head, amused and surprised by Fern's question. “If that don't beat all.”

Then Fern finished her thought. “As long as the cow says, ‘Mooo,' I'll drink it tooo.”

“All this talk about where milk comes from,” Ma Charles said. “Milk comes from a cow. Maybe a goat. In all my eighty-two years I never drank a drop of factory milk and I won't start now. Never had an egg come out of a carton or a loaf of bread that didn't rise up in my oven, and furthermore, it's a sin to throw a nickel on a head of cabbage or a bunch of carrots that already grows up out of my own dirt.”

“Thank you, Claretha Darrow,” Big Ma said. Claretha must have been Aretha Franklin's pulpit-preaching twin, for all we knew: Big Ma, like Ma Charles, was on a roll. She was funniest when she didn't mean to make us laugh. “You all haven't been down home a full minute and you're already raising Mama's pressure and mine along with hers.”

Ma Charles tsk-tsked about how lean and undernourished JimmyTrotter looked and then told him to sit down.
“Your old great-granny is in such poor health she can't rise up from her death bed to feed you.”

JimmyTrotter winked at me and said to Ma Charles, “Miss Trotter's far from her deathbed, Auntie. She gets around and cooks plenty. I know because I eat plenty.”

“I doubt she gets around, as old and sickly as she is,” Ma Charles insisted.

“Mama!” Big Ma scolded. “You two are the same age.”

“Twins!” Vonetta exclaimed. “You're twin sisters. I hope twins run in the family. I'm having twins.”

“You're having breakfast,” is what Big Ma said. “Never mind no twins.”

“Twins nothing,” Ma Charles said, truly riled by the thought. “My mama had me first. Her mama had her second. You tell her that,” she ordered. JimmyTrotter gave her a “Yes'm, Auntie,” and threw me another sly wink.

“Do you hear this?” Big Ma said. “Stop telling the family business.”

“Aren't we the family?” Fern asked.

JimmyTrotter said, “Don't worry about Miss Trotter. Great-granny goes out with her deer rifle. Can still pick off a rabbit every now and then.”

“What's that to me?” Ma Charles said, but she was now ruffled at being contradicted. “I fish the wide end of the creek and tend that garden.”

“Ma, you haven't gone—”

But Ma Charles waved her hand to tell Big Ma to hush
and continued to speak over her. “You tell her I said there's no shame in using that cane I sent her. Pride goeth before the fall.” I caught my great-grandmother half rolling her eyes.

“Miss Trotter's just fine, Auntie,” he said, although she was his great-aunt. “And she wants to know if your rheumatism's any better. If you need another bottle of ginger and goldenseal.”

“Ma don't need any Indian roots and berries,” Big Ma said. “She needs to see about her sister.”

“I know about my half sister, all right,” Ma Charles snapped real fast. “I know all about her.”

Fern whispered in a weak voice, “She hunts deer? And rabbits?”

Vonetta held up her fork as if it had a trigger and a barrel. I slapped the fork down and dared Vonetta to do something about it.

Then Uncle Darnell came into the kitchen and said, “Ma, you packed my lunchbox? My thermos?” Big Ma was especially happy to fuss over her son. When Uncle Darnell looked toward Vonetta, she turned her face away and chomped on her cereal as hard as she could.