Maybe spite was catching. Uncle Darnell had left for school and returned without the milk he had promised. Furthermore, regardless of what Ma Charles had said, JimmyTrotter came over the next morning with far less than the two quarts of milk that he normally brought.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Sophie,” JimmyTrotter said, probably hoping Ma Charles would take pity. “I might have to take her to town for beef.”
I prayed Fern didn’t catch on and that Vonetta wasn’t mean enough to explain what JimmyTrotter said about taking Sophie to town.
“You tell your old great-granny: no milk, no eggs,” Ma Charles said. “An understanding is an understanding.”
“Auntie, I brought all that Sophie gave.”
“And it don’t fill a bottle,” Ma Charles said.
“It’s just enough for one bowl of cereal, and I called it,” Vonetta said.
“I refuse to take the insult,” Ma Charles said. “Take those three drops of milk on back to her.”
“I want it!” Vonetta wailed.
“You’ll take nothing,” Ma Charles said.
JimmyTrotter said, “I don’t know about Sophie. I expected at least another two months from her.”
“It’s because they sold her boy calf to the butcher. For hamburgers,” Vonetta said to Fern. I could have smacked Vonetta. Smacked the smile off her face.
“Vonetta!”
“Stop treating her like a baby,” Vonetta snapped back. She had no idea of how close I came to popping her. “You love to baby your baby.” To Fern she said, “And you stop acting like a baby. Pa and Mrs. can’t diaper you and the new baby.”
I reached out to snag Vonetta but she was quick and leaped away, laughing.
“Don’t let me catch you,” I told her.
“Stop picking on Vonetta,” JimmyTrotter said.
Fern began to cry for Sophie’s calf. I held out my arms and she stepped into them. I sniffed the top of her head, which was sweet from coconut oil and tangled from no combing. I rocked her as she cried.
Vonetta rolled her eyes and mouthed, Baby. Big Ma used to say there wasn’t a human being as unfeeling and selfish as Cecile. I could say the same thing about Vonetta.
JimmyTrotter pleaded to let him have a few more eggs but Ma Charles sat up straight in the pine chair her father made, looking every bit as “onchee” as her sister. “She’s doing this to pay me back because all my folks are living and all hers—but one—have gone to glory. I never heard of anything more spiteful.”
“Auntie,” JimmyTrotter said, “Miss Trotter wouldn’t do anything to keep Sophie from milking. That’s just—” He was too respectful to call an elder crazy but it was Alabama crazy. “She wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“Heaven knows what she dropped in the grass. Plenty of weeds around to kill a cow or dry her up,” Ma Charles said. “Pure T spiteful.”
“Auntie, you know that’s not true. We depend on Sophie and Butter too,” he said. “There’s no cowbane for miles. I always check where they graze.”
Big Ma had heard all the spite and evil going on and emerged from her room. “Mama,” she scolded, “the Lord don’t like meanness.” Then she said to JimmyTrotter, “Son, you take as many eggs as you need.”
Ma Charles shook the milk bottle. “That’s two eggs and no more.”
“Delphine,” Big Ma said. “Go in the coop and get a dozen eggs.”
“A dozen?” Ma Charles said. “A dozen?”
For once, JimmyTrotter didn’t want to be around for the fussing between his aunts. “I know where everything is.” He got up and was out the back door before it would start.
“Should be ashamed of yourself,” Big Ma scolded. “You’re no better than these children.”
“It’s you who should be ashamed,” Ma Charles said. “Setting the wrong example for your grands. Showing them they don’t have to live up to their word. Being disrespectful to your own mother. Raising my pressure.”
“Let’s help JimmyTrotter,” I told Fern, although he didn’t need our help. I didn’t much care what Vonetta did but she trailed behind us. JimmyTrotter had already taken what he needed and was crossing the field, heading into the pines.
He’d left enough eggs for us to gather and bring inside.
“I want my milk for my cornflakes. It’s all that stupid cow’s fault.” Vonetta pouted.
“Don’t call her that,” Fern said. “She’s not stupid. She’s sad. She wants her baby cow and her baby cow is gone for good.”
“If you call dead gone,” Vonetta cackled in Miss Trotter’s voice.
“Vonetta!”
She stood there with cow eyes.
I didn’t have to beat Vonetta. I knew exactly how to get her. I planted one hand on my hip and pointed with the other. “That’s why you don’t have real friends. Just sometime-y, fake friends who take your things. But you’re too chickenhearted to stand up to your fake friends so you jump on your little sister every chance you get. And your sometime-y, fake friends must laugh at you behind your back and in front of your face because they know you’re too chicken to do anything about it. Serves you right. You’re selfish, a show-off, whiny—”
“And mean to your little sister!”
“That especially,” I said.
Vonetta seemed to bask in our insults, wearing each one proudly. “I don’t care what you call me. I’m getting my milk.”
“Then get it,” I said.
“I can and I will. And it will be for me and my cornflakes.”
I turned to Fern. “Let’s play Old Maid.”
“Let’s.”
I pulled out the cards and Fern and I sat on the rug with our legs folded. Then I dealt cards to Fern and me, Fern and me, until we had our hands.
Vonetta turned on her heel.
That night, as the Apollo 11 spacecraft continued on its journey back to Earth, Uncle D came home from school and work at the mill. Vonetta didn’t speak to him, but she watched him. Saw that he had nothing but his lunch pail, coffee thermos, and college books. She grunted hard and angrily and marched into the room.
“No milk?” I asked.
He slapped his head. “I knew I forgot something. Look, I’ll go—”
“You’ll go lie down, son,” Big Ma said. “The world doesn’t spin and stop on a bowl of cornflakes. And we’ll be lucky the earth keeps spinning like it’s supposed to—with men poking through space, hopping around on God’s moon. Son, you been working and going to school. You go lie down.”
When we walked over to Miss Trotter’s the next day, Miss Trotter was quick to shoo us away. “Get on back.” She muttered something about Ma Charles and said, “Don’t you feel this cold in the air?”
I was sweating from tramping through fields and trees in the heat. The steamy, hot air.
Miss Trotter raised a finger to the air and nodded. “You don’t feel this cold? Get back over the creek before you get caught in it.”
“Caught in what?” I asked.
“The storm,” JimmyTrotter said. He looked up.
“Dern astronauts, ripping through space, tearing holes here and everywhere.”
Then Vonetta said in Ma Charles’s voice, her tambourine-shaking voice, “Cast not thy rod through the clouds,” and then added in Big Ma’s voice, “A mercy, Lord.”
“Hear that?” Miss Trotter said. “Even that old sister of mine knows a storm’s coming. Don’t know why she let you out. Now get going.”
“Can I take the bike, cousin JT? You know I’ll bring it back.”
JT?
And he let her rename him with a shrug and a nod.
“Sure, cuz.”
“Tell her,” I said. “Like you told me since the day Papa and I came over. Come on, tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“‘Call me JimmyTrotter or don’t call me.’”
JimmyTrotter smiled. “JT’s all right between Vonetta and me.”
“See, meanie?” she said to me.
And she rode the bike while Fern and I skipped over the creek.
Maybe there was something to what Miss Trotter, Ma Charles, and Big Ma had to say about man sending things out of this earth poking holes in the sky, and having wrath hurled back down at him. When the astronauts broke through the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific, we were repaid with an electrical storm. Every outlet was unplugged from every socket and the house stayed dark, except for the lit candle in a few rooms, including ours.
Fern and I huddled together, and Vonetta, determined to not huddle with us, stayed over in her own corner of the room.
I didn’t care how mad Vonetta was. I started to miss her so I said, “Come over here with us.”
“Yeah, meanie. Come over.”
Vonetta didn’t even bother to say no. She just wrapped herself in her blanket and turned her back to us.
“Be that way,” I said.
“Be,” Fern echoed.
We had electrical storms in Brooklyn but nothing to confirm God’s anger. Blasts of white gold blazed through the dark, and we covered our ears to brace for the thunder. First the sound of the earth being cracked open like a walnut, followed by booms big enough to move the house.
Each time the lightning cracked and the thunder boomed, Fern and I hugged tighter. Surely, Vonetta would forget being angry and scoot our way so we could be scared together.
Black Pocahontas stayed wrapped in her blanket teepee pretending to be unafraid. I don’t remember the thunder and lightning ending but through it all, we’d fallen asleep.
In the morning when I woke up, Vonetta was gone.