Boys Life

to come to her house!”
    “I don’t care.” Dad gave her back the letter. “I’m not goin’.”
    “Why, Tom? Give me one good reason.”
    “Phillies are playin’ the Pirates on radio Friday night,” he said as he retired to the comfort of his easy chair. “That’s reason enough.”
    “I don’t think so,” Mom told him, setting her jaw.
    Here we came to a rare fact of life: my parents, though I believe they got along better than ninety-nine percent of the married couples in Zephyr, did have their go-rounds. Just as no one person is perfect, no marriage of two imperfects is going to be without a scrape of friction here and there. I have seen my father blow his top over a missing sock when in fact he was mad he didn’t get a raise at the dairy. I have seen my usually placid mother steam with anger over a muddy bootmark on the clean floor when in fact the root of her discontent lay in a rude remark from a neighbor. So, in this tangled web of civilities and rage riots that we know as life, such things will happen as now began to take shape in my parents’ house.
    “It’s because she’s colored, isn’t it?” Mom threw the first punch. “That’s the real reason.”
    “No, it’s not.”
    “You’re as bad as your daddy about that. I swear, Tom-”
    “Hush!” he hollered. Even I staggered. The comment about Granddaddy Jaybird, who was to racism as crabgrass is to weeds, had been a very low blow. Dad did not hate colored people, and this I knew for sure, but please remember that Dad had been raised by a man who saluted the Confederate flag every morning of his life and who considered black skin to be the mark of the devil. It was a terrible burden my father was carrying, because he loved Granddaddy Jaybird but he believed in his heart, as he taught me to believe, that hating any other man-for any reason-was a sin against God. So this next statement of his had more to do with pride than anything else: “And I’m not takin’ charity from that woman, either!”
    “Cory,” Mom said, “I believe you have some math homework to do?”
    I went to my room, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hear them.
    They weren’t really loud, just intense. I suspected this had been brewing awhile, and came from a lot of different places: the car in the lake, the wasps at Easter, the fact that Dad couldn’t afford to buy me a new bike, the dangers of the flood. Listening to Dad tell Mom that she couldn’t put a rope around his neck and drag him into the Lady’s house, I got the feeling that it all boiled down to this: the Lady scared him.
    “No way!” he said. “I’m not goin’ to see somebody who fools with bones and old dead animals and-” He stopped, and I figured he’d realized he was describing Granddaddy Jaybird. “I’m just not,” he finished on a lame note.
    Mom had decided she had run this horse to death. I could hear it in her sigh. “I’d like to go find out what she has to say. Is that all right with you?”
    Silence. Then, in a quiet voice: “Yeah, it’s all right.”
    “I’d like to take Cory, too.”
    This started another flare-up. “Why? You want him to see the skeletons hangin’ in that woman’s closet? Rebecca, I don’t know what she wants and I don’t care! But that woman plays with conjure dolls and black cats and God knows what all! I don’t think it’s right to take Cory into her house!”
    “She asks, right here in the letter, that we bring Cory. See?”
    “I see it. And I don’t understand it, either, but I’m tellin’ you: the Lady is not to be messed with. You remember Burk Hatcher? Used to be assistant foreman at the dairy back in ‘fifty-eight?”
    “Yes.”
    “Burk Hatcher used to chew tobacco. Chewed gobs of it, and he was always spittin’. Got to be a bad habit he hardly even knew he had, and-don’t you dare tell anybody this-but a couple of times he forgot himself and spat right in a milk vat.”
    “Oh, Tom! You don’t mean it!”
    “Right as rain, I do. Now, Burk Hatcher was walkin’ down Merchants Street one day, had just got his hair cut at Mr. Dollars’s-and he had a full, thick head of hair he could hardly pull a comb through-and he forgot himself and spat on the sidewalk. Only the tobacco wattle never hit the sidewalk, ’cause it got on the Moon Man’s shoes. Smack dab all over ’em. Wasn’t on purpose, as I understand it. The Moon Man was just walkin’ past. Well, Burk had a weird sense of humor, and this thing struck him as