It rained so heavily over the next two days, we stayed at Ma Charles’s and played Old Maid. When the sky’s color returned to clear blue and the air was once again clean-smelling, we ran outside and let the chickens out of the coop, and between us and Caleb, we kept an eye on them so they wouldn’t get away. Big Ma had me help her clip their wing feathers, which neither the chickens nor Fern appreciated, but clipping their wings made it easier to keep track of them while they strutted about the yard. When they had enough freedom, we chased them inside the run, where they could still strut about freely.
The next day we went back over to Miss Trotter’s, happy to have the walk and to wade down at the shallow end of the creek. After we had our fill of being on the other side, I told Miss Trotter, “I don’t understand why you can’t talk to your sister face-to-face, Miss Trotter.”
“Respect your elders, Delphine,” Vonetta said. “Great Miss Trotter can do what she wants.”
“You tell her,” Great Miss Trotter said.
“Well, she is eld,” Fern pointed out to me. “Past tense for old.”
Miss Trotter said, “She’s the one who must come this way and beg my pardon. She has to walk to my home and wipe clean that hex she put over my generations.”
“Hex?” I asked.
“It means bad luck,” Vonetta said.
“I know what it means,” I snapped at her. She was only brave because Miss Trotter was right there.
Miss Trotter said, “My sister has done many a wicked thing against me out of envy. Many a wicked thing.”
“Ma Charles?” I asked. “Our great-grandmother?”
“She wasn’t born a great-granny,” Miss Trotter said. “She was a young, wicked, jealous girl. When Steven Hazzard courted and married me, she married Henry Charles to keep up with me. My husband understood about my father and let me keep my name and let me name our son after my father. But the wicked one couldn’t let that be. One Sunday as we strolled in town, she on one side of the street with her husband, and me with mine and my son in arms, she said, ‘Well, if it isn’t the Trotters. Hiya, Steven Trotter.’ That was the last I seen of my husband.”
Miss Trotter didn’t strike me to be a crying woman, but I saw her tears well up although she wouldn’t let them roll. She pointed her finger at me and said, “She wiped out every sprig of my generations—she hates me so. Wiped out each one but JimmyTrotter.”
“Ma Charles didn’t do any such thing. She wouldn’t.” As I held my stare with Miss Trotter I knew it didn’t matter that I didn’t believe in hexes or curses. My great-aunt did, and for that matter, so did my great-grandmother.
Miss Trotter turned to Vonetta and put on her sweet voice. “What was that you told your sister?”
Vonetta knew when she was being coached and ate it up. “I told her to respect her elders.”
“That’s right! Respect!” Miss Trotter cried out. “You!”—she went from sweetness to pointing and almost shouting at me—“haven’t lived as long as my toenails! You don’t know what Naomi did and didn’t do. Would or wouldn’t do. Now, if she has something to say to me, she can journey over the creek on her two feet. Her two feet.” She turned to Vonetta, her helpmate. “Go get that cane, dear one.”
Vonetta took off like a foot soldier in Miss Trotter’s army. She returned with the wooden cane, presenting it with pride to her general.
“Yes, yes,” Miss Trotter said, and kissed Vonetta on her forehead. We weren’t a kissing kind of family, so Vonetta ate that right up. “She can borrow the cane she gave me to come beg my pardon.”
When we got to the house I asked my great-grandmother, “Why won’t you talk to your sister?”
My great-grandmother said, “I talk to her every day.”
“How is that?”
“Through prayer. I pray to the Lord for my half sister’s wicked soul.” But Ma Charles wasn’t joking with me. There was no winking or twinkle in her eyes.
Vonetta said, “Don’t worry, Ma Charles. I didn’t believe the part about you chasing her husband out of town.”
Ma Charles just laughed and laughed. “You tell the widow Hazzard I’m sorry for her loss.” She laughed some more.
“Cut it out, Vonetta,” I warned. “If you’re not going to say it right you shouldn’t say it at all.”
“Oh, hush,” Ma Charles said, eager for more. “What else she say?”
“Know what she said, Ma Charles?” Vonetta asked.
I kicked Vonetta, a really good one. Then Ma Charles said, “Don’t let me see you do that again.” And Vonetta moved closer to Ma Charles and rubbed the side of her leg.
“Now, what did the old cow say?”
“I’m not calling her an old cow, but Miss Trotter said if you want to talk to her face-to-face, you have to walk on your two left feet over the creek with the cane and take the hex off her first.” Vonetta added the part about “left” feet to stir up trouble. It worked.
Ma Charles leaped out of her chair—and she was generally slow-moving. “Oh! Oh! Spare her, Lord! Spare her, Lord! For I surely will get her! I surely will! Where’s my tambourine?”
Big Ma came running. “Mama, Mama! Mama, sit down! Sit down, Mama!” She turned to me. “Delphine, what did you do? What did you—”
Before I knew it, my grandmother backhanded me across the cheek so hard I saw white.
I stayed away from everyone for the next day and night. I stayed up in the pecan tree with my book when I could and slept on the porch at night. Since I had already run through the other two books I had packed, I had no choice but to finish Things Fall Apart. It was the perfect book, since Okonkwo couldn’t do right, and neither could any of the adults on this side of the creek or the other.
When I finally came down from my tree I went to Little Miss Ethel Waters first.
“Vonetta. You have to stop going back and forth telling those tales.”
“I’m not telling tales and you can’t tell me what to do.”
I wanted to hit her right then and there. If only Cecile could see her precious Vonetta now. “Watch out for Vonetta” my fat fanny.
“Our aunt and our great-grandma should be rocking on this porch together. Not sending poison pen letters back and forth through you.”
“So.”
“They’re old, Vonetta. And one of them is going to die first.” I refused to say it the southern hymn way—“the sweet by-and-by.” “Then the one left alive will say, ‘I miss my sister.’ And you’ll feel rotten in your rotten little heart because you helped to keep them apart. Then what?”
“Yeah, then what?” Fern asked.
Vonetta crossed her arms. “One thing’s for sure. I’ll never miss you.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I hope you don’t act like this when Pa and Mrs.’s baby comes.”
There was a lot of silence before there was anything else.
“What?” one asked loud.
“Baby?” The other, soft.
I didn’t mean to tell them like this. It slipped out. From the looks on their faces, one trying to be proud and cool, the other crumbling, I wished I had told them sooner. And nicely.
“Pa and Mrs. are having a baby,” I said. “That’s why she’s been so sick.”
“Babies don’t make you sick,” Vonetta said.
“This one’s making Mrs. sick,” I said.
“A baby?”
“A B-A-B-Y, baby,” Vonetta sang. “That means you won’t be the baby, you crybaby.”
“That means you won’t be the middle, you show-off.”
“Baby, baby, ’bout to cry. Wipe that tear from your eye.”
Fern didn’t bother to ball up her fists or bang them at her sides, her warning that she was about to strike. She just started to windmill-punch at Vonetta, and I let her. Vonetta whipped free and dodged to her left, then right, like a fighter in the boxing ring, taunting and teasing Fern. Vonetta was discovering her longer legs, dodging and dashing off, avoiding Fern’s blows. Fern could never catch her, but I could.
“Stop picking on Fern just because you can!” I yelled at her.
“Fern’s a big baby.”
“And you’re afraid to get your watch back, you chicken.”
“I am not.”
“Chicken.”
“I’m not a chicken.”
“You’re more chicken than all those chickens in the yard—waving and smiling at those girls who are laughing at you. What do you think they call you? Certainly not Vonetta.”
“I hate you, Delphine.”
“I don’t care. Just stop picking on Fern. She’s your little sister.”
Vonetta opened her mouth like she was about to say something, then shut it and walked away.