The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had (8 page)

Emma didn’t answer.

Finally, I gave up trying to teach Emma real swimming and Pearl just showed her how to doggy paddle. Emma kind of got that. She went in up to her neck, lifted her feet and paddled around.

It was late in the afternoon when we all walked home, letting the hot sun dry us off. “I kind of liked swimming,” said Emma, which surprised me, since she’d spent most of the afternoon complaining. “Though not as much as baseball.”

When we got home, Mama and Mrs. Walker were waiting on our front porch with a strange man in a suit.

“There you three are,” said Mama. “We’ve been waiting for you.” She turned to the man beside her. “This here’s Mr. Rich. He’s from the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission.”

The man nodded politely at us. “We’re trying to wipe out the hookworm infestations that are so common in rural communities.”

“I don’t have worms, sir,” Emma said politely. “I always wear shoes.”

He looked pointedly at her bare feet and the shoes in her hand.

Emma blushed and muttered, “They were teaching me to swim.”

That’s when I noticed that Mrs. Walker was holding a jar and Mama was holding two.

The man cleared his throat. “We’ll just need a stool sample from everyone in town under the age of eighteen. Unless you always wear shoes. Then you couldn’t have caught them.”

Mama held out a jar to me and gestured toward the outhouse.

“You want me to poop here in this jar?” I asked.

Pearl giggled.

“Well, yes,” said the man.

“I’d rather not,” I said, and made to hand the jar back to Mama.

“Dit,” Mama said sharply. “Best do as the man asks.”

“Eweee!” said Pearl, but she picked up her own jar.

Emma took the jar from her mama but whispered to me before she stormed off, “If I have worms, I’m gonna kill you.”

She didn’t, of course. But pretty much every other kid in town did. Every evening for a week after dinner, Mama gave me and Pearl and my brothers a huge, chalky white pill. At the end of the week, I swallowed my pride along with the last pill and picked out a pair of old loafers from the barrel in the kitchen.

“Finally,” Mama said with a smile. “That Emma girl’s starting to rub off.”

14

 

 

 

LATE THAT AUGUST, I CAME UP WITH A plan to make money for the Fourth hunt. I would catch rabbits and sell them to people in town. Rabbits were a cheap way of serving meat on Sunday. I figured people would pay ten to twenty cents for a big swamp rabbit.

Swamp rabbits are just like regular old cottontails ’cept they’re bigger and like to swim. They have real thick, dark brown fur. Most rabbits won’t go into the water ’less they’re forced, but a swamp rabbit will dive under just for fun and swim along with only its little nose peeking up out of the water. The broom sage patch near the river, the one me and Emma had cut through after the buzzard, had a whole mess of rabbits, so I went down there to set up my snares.

Most people set snares that choke and kill a rabbit. Those are easy to set but make the meat tough since the rabbits tend to struggle a bit before they die. I came up with a special snare that would squeeze shut only enough to trap the rabbit, keeping it alive till you were ready to eat it. Then it was just a quick snap to break its neck and you had fresh meat for dinner.

Two days later I went back to the broom sage patch to check my snares. No rabbits. That was unusual, but it took a couple of days for the human smell to fade from the thin wire I used. Maybe I hadn’t waited long enough.

So two days later I came back again. Still no rabbits. When I looked closer, I realized all my traps had been sprung. I had caught something, but it had escaped. Wasn’t even a tuft of hair left behind. That was mighty strange. I reset my snares and dreamed of huge, bald rabbits that would fetch fifty cents apiece.

When three days later I still hadn’t caught nothing, I was beginning to get frustrated. Had the rabbits gone someplace else? Had I forgotten how to set a snare? Late that afternoon me and Emma were drinking root beer in our cave when I mentioned that there didn’t seem to be no rabbits around this year.

“What are you talking about?” said Emma. “I’ve seen lots of them.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Over in the broom sage patch by the river.”

“What?”

“They were trapped in some old wire. I untangled them and let them go.”

“You let them go?”

“Of course.”

“I set those traps!”

Emma looked at me blankly. “You did?”

I nodded.

“Oh, Dit, I don’t think you should do that.”

“Well, it ain’t up to you.”

“Those poor rabbits are defenseless.”

“They’re food.”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t want you trapping them anymore.”

“Those rabbits were my Fourth hunt money!” I snapped.

“The Fourth hunt is just a stupid game.”

“That ain’t fair, Emma.” I was yelling now. “I’ve spent all summer showing you around Moundville. Teaching you to swim and dig a cave and throw stones and play baseball. You can’t just come down here and tell me all the things we do to have fun and earn money are wrong.”

“Fine,” said Emma. She put down her soda and crawled out of the cave. I kicked the bottle over and watch the soda fizz out into the dirt. It didn’t make me feel any better.

So I waited until I was sure she was gone, and I went down to the Black Warrior to throw some stones.

I threw stones for a long time, till my arm began to ache and I wasn’t mad no more. I liked being friends with Emma. And now I’d gone and ruined it over some stupid rabbits. But the Fourth hunt wasn’t stupid—not to me—so I wasn’t sure what I could’ve done different.

I felt her come up and stand beside me. Saw her throw a couple of stones into the water until I finally turned to look at her.

“What do you want?”

“You’re right,” Emma said quietly.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t tell you what to do. Mama always said I’d have more friends if I weren’t so bossy.”

I hadn’t expected her to apologize. Chip never did that. I threw a few more stones. “You ain’t so bad.”

“It’s just . . . I had a pet rabbit up in Boston. Used to keep her in a cage under our front porch. I had to give her away when we moved down here.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t have a lot of friends in Boston, Dit, even though there were tons of kids around. Sometimes, that little rabbit was the only one I could talk to.”

“Oh.”

“But I know people eat them down south. They served them at the potluck at our church. So I guess I can’t say there’s anything wrong with you trapping them.”

I nodded in thanks, unsure what I was supposed to say. We threw a few more stones, then walked home without talking.

But even though Emma had given me her blessing, I felt differently about rabbits after that. Thinking about her alone, in the skinny row house, talking to her pet rabbit, well, it made me feel kind of sad. So the next day I gathered up my snares. I’d still eat rabbit stew if my mama served it, but I’d have to find another way to earn money for the Fourth hunt.

15

 

 

 

BEFORE I KNEW IT, IT WAS THE FIRST OF September and me and Emma were walking through the aisles of Mrs. Pooley’s store, buying pens, paper and ink for school. Emma picked up a box of chalk and put it in her basket.

“Why you buying chalk?” I asked.

“Mama told me to get some for the teacher.”

“Teacher don’t need your chalk,” I scoffed. “She’s got her own.”

“Dit,” Emma sighed. “I’m not going to your school.”

Course she wasn’t. There weren’t no Negras at my school. I knew that. I scuffed my shoes on the dusty floor. “Guess you’re going to the Wilson school.”

“Yes, I am.”

“But Elbert ain’t learned nothing there. He can’t read no better than Pearl.”

“Mama says I’ll have to make the best of it.” Emma lowered her voice when we noticed Big Foot was standing at the end of the aisle. “I don’t really have a choice,” she whispered.

Now that I thought about it, that didn’t seem quite right.

Big Foot walked down the aisle toward us, a beer in one hand. “Only one school around here for a nigger. And if you ask me, that’s one too many.”

I looked up at him. His mouth was drawn up in disgust, as if he had just caught me picking my nose. Emma stared at the chalk in her basket.

“Thought I told you, Dit,” he continued, “stay with your own kind.” He knocked me on the back of my head with the bottle and strolled over to the front counter, his dusty black boots clicking on the wooden floor.

“You won’t want to be friends with me once school starts,” Emma said quietly.

“Yes, I will.” Sure, Emma sometimes drove me crazy with her worrying ’bout rabbits and broken windows, but spending time with her was never boring. Course school was starting soon and Chip was coming back. That got me thinking. Would he look at me the way Big Foot just did? I wondered if Emma was right.

Late that afternoon, me and Earl were helping Pa. The new corn seed had come and was doing pretty well, so now we were working on planting a late crop of turnips in Mama’s garden. Mama had a big vegetable garden: tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, squash, string beans, carrots, lettuce and a whole bunch of other green leafy things I didn’t much like to eat. Mama prided herself on her garden, although it seemed to me that it was us kids who did all the work. ’Cept for the canning. Mama canned so many things, we had vegetables all winter long. I wished she could be like the other mamas and run out sometime after Christmas.

To plant the turnips, Pa would dig a little hole with the hoe, then I’d drop in three tiny seeds. Earl’s job was to cover them up, but he lagged a row or two behind me and Pa. The half-gallon sack of turnip seeds was heavy on my shoulder. “Pa?” I asked.

“Yes, Earl, uh, Raymond, I mean Dit?” He didn’t look up.

“Why does Emma gotta go to the Wilson school? It’s two miles away.”

“Walking never hurt no one.” My pa was big on walking.

“I know. But why don’t Negras and whites go to school together?”

Pa shrugged. “Always been that way.” He continued digging, each hole exactly the same.

“Don’t seem fair, though.” I dropped my three turnip seeds. “Specially when there’s a perfectly good school just down the road.”

“When I was a boy,” Pa said, “the Negras ain’t had no school at all.”

“But after working in the fields all summer, Buster’s got skin darker than Elbert,” I pointed out. “And he don’t go to the Wilson school.”

“Skin burnt brown by the sun ain’t the same thing and you know it. Besides, Elbert’s light skinned ’cause his grandpa was a white man.”

“His grandpa married a Negra?”

Pa stopped digging and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. He was upset. I thought he was gonna yell at me, but all he said was: “I already said too much. Let’s just concentrate on planting these turnips.”

I carefully put three seeds into each hole. “I still don’t understand why Emma can’t go to school with me.”

“Dit, just . . . gosh dang it!”

I glanced up. Earl was three or four rows behind us now. Mama’s chickens were following me, eating the seeds as fast as I put them into the holes.

Pa exploded, “I’d like to kill every one of those dang birds!”

So I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could. It hit a chicken. The bird fell over dead. I picked up another rock, but Pa grabbed my arm. “Maybe you better not kill them all.”

Pearl ran out then, her apron strings dragging on the ground. “The chickens got out! The chickens got out!”

“Thank you, Pearl,” Pa said quietly. “We know.”