I spit on the hinges so the screen door won’t squeak and stick my head into the kitchen.
There’s a pot top clattering on the stove and the transistor radio is playing a rhythm-and-blues song and the floor looks clean but tacky in places. That means Lou’s got to be close by. I’m praying that she’s not hiding in the broom closet, getting ready to pounce out at us screaming, “Gotcha!” the way she likes to do. She thinks that’s funny. I don’t think Woody could handle that right now. She’s already full-to-the-brim with scared.
“Shh.” I place my fingers to my sister’s lips until I remember how dumb that is. We begin creeping across the linoleum. “Get up on your ballerina toes,” I whisper, forgetting all about how loud that creak is in front of the stove.
“’Bout time,” Lou calls high and mighty out of the dining room.
Damnation.
“Get in here, you two.”
I lead Woody into the grandest room of our house. Red flocked wallpaper runs from the ceiling to the floor and a portrait of Woodrow Wilson in a gilt frame hangs above the sideboard. The twenty-eighth president of the United States was born in Staunton, a town up the road a piece. Papa admires him quite a bit. Enough to name his only children Jane Woodrow and Shenandoah Wilson. On the dining room walls, there’s also a couple of pictures of Carmodys that date back to the 1700s. Grampa’s got the most important of them up at his house, but we have Hiram Carmody, who rode with the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. They were a band of explorers who discovered the Shenandoah Valley from a crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Our gorgeous valley must’ve seemed like a mirage to them. I’m grateful Woody and me don’t take after those Founders. I think Grampa Gus inherited his sour disposition from these old codgers. Every one of them looks like he swallowed a bottle of cod liver oil and asked for seconds.
Lou’s up on a stepladder cleaning the crystal chandelier that hangs above the polished mahogany dining table that sits twelve. “You’re late,” she says, not even bothering to look down at us.
“I know… we got…” I so resent explaining myself to her.
“Ya just missed your pappy. He came askin’ for ya.”
I can feel my sister bunch up again beneath my fingertips. “What’d ya tell him?” I ask, gliding my hand up Woody’s neck. Stroking where her hair meets her skin keeps her calm.
“The truth, a course,” Lou says haughty. “That y’all wouldn’t mind me and went flittin’ to town, blabbin’ with anybody who’d bother talkin’ to you about your mama.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” I say, rubbing Woody’s neck even harder.
“Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t,” Lou says with a rise of her right eyebrow. “Ya just can’t know for sure, can ya.”
Oh, yeah I can.
I can barely stand breathing the same air Lou does these days, but I love her uncle, Mr. Cole Jackson, to bits. He’s the one who taught me how to play cards. Papa doesn’t give us any spending money so beating Lou and Mr. Cole at poker is how I can afford to buy Band-Aids and drawing supplies for Woody. That’s how I know that Lou raises up her right eyebrow when she’s got nothing but a pair of sixes but wants to trick you into believing she’s got a royal flush.
“You better tell Woody you’re lying right this minute, Louise, or… or I’ll make sure Papa knows you been sneakin’ out of your cabin to meet up with Blackie,” I say, pulling that ace out of my sleeve. (If those two get caught, you understand who’d get into trouble, don’t you? It wouldn’t be my uncle, that’s for sure. Lou would find herself back in the bayou so fast she wouldn’t even remember taking the trip.)
“If ya think I’m scared of your fath-” Lou smacks her jaw shut. She just remembered that unlike her-I never, ever bluff. “Go on and tell, see if I care,” she says with a toss of her head, but she’s as scared of breaking Papa’s rules as Woody and I are. She’s not supposed to get romantically involved, especially with his brother. She’s supposed to be cooking and cleaning and taking care of Woody and me and that’s it, so that’s why Lou’s backing down. On both counts.
When she gets eye to eyes with us, I tell her with clenched fists, “Woody needs an apology.”
Lou knows that when I get like this that I’m not messing around, so she steps right up to Woody and puts on one of her old-fashioned smiles. “Thought ya knew I was only kiddin’ ’bout tellin’ your pappy that you and your sis been runnin’ into town. Ya know how I like to fun.”
She didn’t used to.
Woody and I spent many an evening over at the Jacksons’ cottage back when Lou was still acting like an older sister. She told us all about her life before she came to Lilyfield and how it was her dream to work someday down at Filly’s beauty salon. Since that will never come true because she is the wrong color, Woody and I felt sorry for her and let her do our hair into pickaninny braids while she told us stories in a drawl so thick and fluid it would suck us right in. You’d think she’d swallowed some of that Louisiana swamp the way she wove those spine-tingling tales of zombies and haunted graveyards and potions made of cat bones that can make a person invisible or bring back a lost lover. Or how red pepper powder is the best thing to use if you want to drive your worst enemy away.
Our best and favorite tale, though, has got to be the legend of the grandest of all gators named Rex. Lou would lean in close and say spooky, “Yes, indeedy. That scaly boy would come sneakin’ out of the swamp, turn the knob to your shanty, and then you know what he’d do?” That’d be my cue to ask, “What? What would that gator do, Lou?” She’d say even spookier, lean even closer, “Why, he’d make hisself at home like he was payin’ the rent, and then those long nails of his would go click click click straight into your bedroom and then he’d…” We’d almost be out of our minds scared by now, waiting for her to say, “And then… and then… he’d eat you whole while ya was asleep, thas what he’d do!” Woody would throw her arms around me and I’d let loose with a scream, the both of us picturing that willful beast climbing not out of the bayou, but out of Last Chance Creek. That’s when Mr. Cole would come rushing to our rescue with a plate of hush puppies and cold ginger ale. He’d laugh and tell Lou to quit. I would always tell Woody after one of those hair-raising evenings, “I know for a fact that we don’t got gators around here, but I think we should sleep in the fort tonight no matter what, don’t you? Our luck hasn’t been so hot lately.”
Lou only started playing pranks on Woody and me the past few months. That’s the same way my uncle treats us and she is trying to impress Papa’s older brother, who fancies himself quite the wit. He was baptized Dwight Alfred Carmody, but nobody calls him that. They call him Blackie, because of his job. My uncle is a lady-killer, but also a blacksmith, and he’s very good at fooling you into thinking he’s somebody he’s not by laying on the charm, which I regrettably admit can be considerable when he wants something from you. Lou, like many of the other young women around town, has fallen head over heels for him even though I’ve tried to tell her time and time again, “Are you crazy? You better get ahold of yourself and be quick about it. He’s gonna break your heart so bad. I know you think he cares for you, but you are sadly mistaken. You’re just another in a long line of what Blackie calls his ‘Kleenex gals.’ When he’s done usin’ you, he’ll toss you into the trash like all the rest of them,” but she won’t listen. I feel sorry for her. Until she pulls something like this.