Alligator Bayou - Donna Jo Napoli [37]
I walk slowly around the house. Something screeches and runs across my path. I stop short. Just a cat. A dog would rip me apart, me sneaking around like this. Something sits on the ground outside one window. A pile of crumpled ferns. Like the ones I wrapped the bowl in. Patricia stood inside that window, for sure.
What’s the worst that could happen? Her uncles might yell at me. They’re not going to have a loaded shotgun waiting by the window.
Are they?
I crouch down under the window and whisper loudly, “Patricia.”
I wait forever.
This is insane. If anyone heard me, they’re going to bonk me over the head with a plank of wood. I straighten up and walk back toward the path.
“Y’all sure give up easy.” Patricia’s standing out front in that soft yellow dress. She walks up to me.
I want to touch her arm. “I liked the ’gator.”
“Come all this way just to tell me that?” The tips of her teeth shine white in the moonlight.
“No. I loved the ’gator. It was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“The best, huh?”
“The very best.”
“Well, if that’s all you got to say, then good night.” She turns to go.
“Wait.”
She spins on her heel.
“I didn’t know you had a cat.” How dumb can I get?
“I didn’t know you was a artist.”
“You opened my present. I saw the ferns on the ground outside the window. You said you wouldn’t open it till you saw me again.”
“I saw you,” says Patricia. “I saw you in my head.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“I like the bowl,” she says.
“Really?”
“No. I love it.” She giggles. “Want to take a walk?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t you want to put shoes on first?”
“What for? Shoes make feet tender. I got strong feet and I aim to keep them strong.”
“You had shoes on at the party.”
“I got a mother, too.”
I laugh. “You make everything so … simple … I mean…”
“Y’all calling me simple?” But she’s laughing, too.
Flustered, I turn and walk off the path.
“Not that way,” Patricia whispers loud. “That way the outhouse.”
“Oh.”
“It be moving all the time.”
“What?”
“In the wintertime it’s too far away; in the summer too close.”
It takes me a minute to catch her joke. I laugh. “I was in your classroom. I held a book.”
“Y’all ain’t never held a book before?”
“Of course I did.” But I didn’t hold a book you’d held. “I went to school in Sicily. Until my mother died.”
“I didn’t know.” Patricia’s voice goes soft. “Sorry you lost your mamma.” She walks ahead now, then turns to face me, so she’s walking backward and I’m walking forward. It’s just like we were at the church earlier tonight, only I was the one walking backward then. “Ever hear they’s seventeen thousand Eye-talians in Louisiana?”
I shake my head. “How do you know?”
“The United States Census of 1890 told me.” She turns and skips a few steps, then turns back to face me again. “Well, not actually them. Miss Clarrie. My teacher. During sugarcane season they’s more, because Eye-talians come from all over to work the harvest.” She points at me and smiles. “Most of them Sicilian. Like y’all. That’s what my teacher say.”
“Your teacher is smart.”
“The smartest woman in the world. Ugly, too. Ugly as a mud fence in a rainstorm.”
“A mud fence?”
“It just mean she really ugly. But that’s good.”
“Good? How come?”
“A pretty woman get married. And a married woman ain’t allowed to teach.”
“What do you like best about her? I mean, besides that she’s the smartest woman in the world.”
“She taught us to ask. Never be afeared to look dumb. ’Cause looking dumb don’t matter. Being dumb, that matter. So just ask. And if you don’t get a straight answer, then go seeking. No matter what it is. Just go seeking.”
I’m suddenly ashamed. I should ask, then. “What’s the United States Census?”
Patricia laughs. “Every ten years our government send people door-to-door collecting information. Who live here? What color? What religion? You know.”
“Why do they want to know that?”
“I’m not sure. But I’m glad.”