“Except for when?” asked Aurelia.
“Well now …” Grandma lowered herself onto a long-legged stool, waving Zelda’s more substantial chair away. Grandma liked to balance on that stool like an oracle on her tripod. “There was that time someone tried to hang their little cousin,” she declared, and then stopped short.
The two aunts gave her quick, unbelieving looks. Then they were both uneasily silent, neither of them willing to take up the slack and tell the story I knew was about June. I’d heard Aurelia and my mother laughing and accusing each other of the hanging in times past, when it had been only a family story and not the private trigger of special guilts. They looked at me, wondering if I knew about the hanging, but neither would open her lips to ask.
So I said I’d heard June herself tell it.
“That’s right,” Aurelia jumped in. “June told it herself. If she minded being hung, well she never let on!”
“If she minded! You were playing cowboys.
“Ha,” Zelda said You and Gordie had her up on a box, the rope looped over a branch, tied on her neck, very accurate. If she minded! I had to rescue her myself!”
“Oh, I know,” Aurelia admitted. “But we saw it in the movies.
Kids imitate them, you know. We got notorious after that, me and Gordie. Remember Zelda? How you came screaming in the house for Mama?”
“Mama! Mama!” Grandma yodeled an imitation of her daughter.
“They’re hanging June!”
“You came running out there, Mama!” Zelda was swept into the story.
“I didn’t know you could run so fast.”
“We had that rope around her neck and looped over the tree, and poor June was shaking, she was so scared. But we never would have done it.”
“Yes!” asserted Zelda. “You meant to!”
“Oh, I licked you two good,” Grandma remembered. “Aurelia, you and Gordie both.”
“And then you took little June in the house. Zelda broke down suddenly.
Aurelia put her hands to her face. Then, behind her fingers, she made a harsh sound in her throat. “Oh Mama, we could have killed her.
Zelda crushed her mouth behind a fist.
“But then she came in the house. You wiped her face off,” Aurelia remembered. “That June. She yelled at me. “I wasn’t scared! You damn chicken!” And then Aurelia started giggling behind her hands.
Zelda put her fist down on the table with surprising force.
“Damn chicken!” said Zelda.
“You had to lick her too.” Aurelia laughed, wiping her eyes.
“For saying hell and damn Grandma nearly lost her — god” balance.
“Then she got madder yet …… I said.
“That’s right!” Now Grandma’s chin was pulled up to hold her laughter back. “She called me a damn old chicken. Right there!
A damn old hen!”
Then they were laughing out loud in brays and whoops, sopping tears in their aprons and sleeves, waving their hands helplessly.
Outside, King’s engine revved grandly, and a trickle of music started up.
“He’s got a tape deck in that car,” Mama said, patting her heart, her hair, composing herself quickly. “I suppose that cos ted extra money.
The sisters sniffed, fished Kleenex from their sleeves, glanced pensively at one another, and put the story to rest.
“King wants to go off after they eat and find Gordie,” Zelda thought out loud. “He at Eli’s place? It’s way out in the bush.”
“They expect to get Uncle Ell to ride in that new car,” said Grandma in strictly measured, knowing tones.
“Eli won’t ride in it.” Aurelia lighted a cigarette. Her head shook back and forth in scarves of smoke. And for once Zelda’s head shook, too, in agreement, and then Grandma’s as well. She rose, pushing her soft wide arms down on the table.
“Why not?” I had to know. “Why won’t Eli ride in that car?”
“Albertine don’t know about that insurance.” Aurelia pointed at me with her chin. So Zelda turned to me and spoke in her low, prim, explaining voice.
“It was natural causes, see. They had a ruling which decided that.
So June’s insurance came through, and all of that money went to King because he’s oldest, legal. He took some insurance and first bought her a big pink gravestone that they put up on the hill.” She paused.
“Mama, we going up there to visit? I didn’t see that gravestone yet.”
Grandma was at the stove, bending laboriously to check the roast ham, and she ignored us.
“Just recently he bought this new car,” Zelda went on, “with the rest of that money. It has a tape deck and all the furnishings.
Eli doesn’t like it, or so I heard. That car reminds him of his girl.
You know Eli raised June like his own daughter when her mother passed away and nobody else would take her.”
“King got that damn old money,” Grandma said loud and sudden, “not because he was oldest. June named him for the money because he took after her the most.”
So the insurance explained the car. More than that it explained why everyone treated the car with special care. Because it was new, I had thought. Still, I had noticed all along that nobody seemed proud of it except for King and Lynette. Nobody leaned against the shiny blue fenders, ‘rested elbows on the hood, or set paper plates there while they ate. Aurelia didn’t even want to hear King’s tapes. It was as if the car was wired up to something. As if it might give off a shock when touched. Later, when Gordie came, he brushed the glazed chrome and gently tapped the tires with his toes. He would not go riding in it, either, even though King urged his father to experience how smooth it ran.
We heard the car move off, wheels crackling in the gravel and cinders.
Then it was quiet for a long time again.
Grandma was dozing in the next room, and I had taken the last pie from the oven. Aurelia’s new green Sears dryer was still huffing away in the tacked-on addition that held toilet, laundry, kitchen sink. The plumbing, only two years old, was hooked up to one side of the house.
The top of the washer and dryer were covered with clean towels, and all the pies had been set there to cool.
“Well, where are they?” wondered Zelda now. “Joyriding?”
“That white girl,” Mama went on, “she’s built like a truck driver.
She won’t keep King long. Lucky you’re slim, Albertine.
“Jeez, Zelda!” Aurelia came in from the next room. “Why can’t you ‘just leave it be? So she’s white. What about the Swede?
can I How do you think Albertine feels hearing you talk like this when her Dad was white?”
“I feel fine,” I said. “I never knew him.”
I understood what Aurefia meant thought was light, clearly a breed.
“My girl’s an Indian,” Zelda emphasized. “I raised her an Indian, and that’s what she is.”
“Never said no different. ” Aurelia grinned, not the least put out, hitting me with her elbow. “She’s lots better looking than most Kashpaws.
By the time King and Lynette finally came home it was near dusk and we had already moved Grandpa into the house and laid his supper out.
Lynette sat down next to Grandpa, with King Junior in her lap.
She began to feed her son ground liver from a little jar. The baby tried to slap his hands together on the spoon each time it was lowered to his mouth. Every time he managed to grasp the jerked out of his hands and came down with more liver.
spoon, I I I Lynette was weary, eyes watery and red. Her tan hair, caught in a stiff club, looked as though it had been used to drag her here.
“You don’t got any children, do you Albertine,” she said, holding the spoon away, licking it herself, making a disgusted face.