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.”