Alligator Bayou - Donna Jo Napoli [53]
I laugh. “I thought you meant really meet her.”
She looks at me sideways. “After I get all the aprons and dresses from my cousin, after you see your friends, we’ll visit Miss Clarrie. She live in Milliken’s Bend.”
“Really?”
“Mmm-hmm. She ain’t no fancy lady. Just a smart one. Hurry now. We got to beat the sun. And keep your eyes open.”
I look up and down the road again.
“No, not that. Look to either side as we come up on this field.”
The road goes straight through cotton fields. The tiny plants have grown a lot since the last time I passed here. They’re bushy with vivid green leaves, broad and shiny.
“Stop,” says Patricia. “Stop and watch.”
The sun hits the fields gradually, and it shines white up here, pink over there, crimson beyond. The next instant the whole place sparkles white and pink and crimson all at once. Flowers! They open with the sunlight. So many of them. And those blossoms, they actually glow.
“You playing ’gator?” asks Patricia.
“What?”
“You standing there with your mouth open like a ’gator catching flies.”
I shake my head. “I was just looking at the flowers. They’re waking up.”
“See why we came at dawn? Ain’t they the best?”
“The best, all right. But why are there three kinds?”
“The flower come out white, then the next day it open pink, then the next day red, then it fall off. All in three days. Next week the flowers will be gone. And last week, wasn’t hardly any. That’s why I waited till now to go to Milliken’s Bend.”
“That why you invited me to come along?”
“Company make sense, seeing as we going the same place.” She lifts her chin and turns me a smooth cheek, but I can tell I caught her. I imagine touching her cheeks.
“They look like silk feels,” I say.
“Them flowers? You ever touched silk?”
“My mother had a silk shawl that belonged to her mother. Mamma was from Rome—how she ever wound up in Sicily, I don’t know. Anyway, she had this shawl in a box and once, when I was little, she wrapped me in it. I remember how it made me feel.”
She stops. “Wait here.” She runs into the field, disappearing between two rows.
I watch up and down the street. A wagon’s coming. I duck down the row she went in. “Patricia? Patricia? Where are you? There’s a wagon on the road. Stay hidden.” I flatten myself on the ground with my chin on the dirt and watch the narrow span of road I can see between the plant rows.
Patricia wriggles up beside me. “You fool,” she whispers. “I told you to dive to the other side. Now if they come after us, they don’t have to bust up.”
Come after us? We didn’t do anything.
It seems like forever for that wagon to get here. It rolls on by. Men. I can’t see how many. Crates piled high. Gone. I get to my knees.
Patricia pulls me back down. “Stay put awhile. Let it get a good distance away. Here.” She shoves something into my hand.
It’s a deep brown husk with an almond-colored inside. “What is this?”
“The outside of a cotton boll. Old, from last autumn. They’s tons of them on the ground. Dig around. But most fall apart, beaten up by the winter. This one whole. Feel inside. Feel the lining.”
I run my thumb inside the cotton-boll husk. “It’s so soft.”
“Like silk.”
“Like you.” I kiss her cheek.
She pushes me away, then stands and checks the road. “Time to go.”
We walk. “Charles told me he chops cotton in autumn,” I say.
“For Mr. Coleman.” She says it with a sneer.
“You don’t like him?”
“His soul fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”
“That’s how I feel about him, too.” I go tight all over, just thinking about how Mr. Coleman acted in the grocery when we didn’t wait on him first.
“Why you talking about Charles chopping cotton, anyway?”
“I want to chop cotton, too.”
“Whites don’t chop cotton.”
“Sicilians aren’t white. Ask Sheriff Lucas.”
“Eye-talian.” She closes her lips in a smile that makes her cheeks bulge like big sweet onions.