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“No, ma’am,” I said. “We’re not crazy and we’re not in love, either.”
“You just tryin’ to cause trouble then, white boy?” she demanded.
“All I did was kiss her,” I explained. “But we did cause some trouble.”
The old lady thought about it a moment, then she cracked a smile.
It was like a photographic negative of our march through Eudora. By the time we got to the crossroads by Hemple’s store, we had a crowd of spectators tagging along with us.
One of the old men looked up from his checkerboard, his face grim. “Now see what you done,” he said to me. “You done kicked over the anthill for sure. They comin’ down here tonight, and they gonna lynch you up somethin’ fierce. And some of us, besides.”
“Then we’d better get ready for them,” Moody said.
“Ready?” said the other checkers player. “Wh
at you mean ready, girl? You mean we best say our prayers. Best go make the pine box ourselves.”
“You got a gun for shootin’ squirrel, don’t you?” said Moody. “You got a knife to skin it with, don’t you?”
The old man nodded. “Well, sho’, but what does that—”
“They can’t beat all of us,” Moody said. “Not if we’re ready for them.”
The people around us were murmuring to one another. Moody’s words had started a brushfire among them. “Let ’em come!” cried a young man. “Let ’em come on!”
Moody looked at me with soulful eyes. And then she did something I will never forget. I will carry it with me my whole life, the way I have carried Marcus’s kindness to Mama.
She took my hand in hers again. Not for show, because she wanted to. We walked hand in hand to Abraham’s house.
Chapter 131
I THOUGHT I would be standing guard alone on the porch that evening, but at midnight Moody appeared—wearing a clean white jumper, of course.
“I couldn’t sleep, thinking how you hadn’t had nothing to eat the whole day long.” She set before me a plate of butter beans, field peas, and shortening bread.
The minute I smelled it, I was starving. “Thank you kindly,” I said.
“You’re welcome kindly,” she said, easing down to the chair beside me.
I dove in. “There was this old colored lady who raised me,” I said, “and she always sang, ‘Mammy’s little baby loves short’nin’—’ ”
“Hush up, fool!” Moody said.
I held up both hands in surrender. “All right, all right,” I said, laughing.
“You can’t help it, I reckon,” she said, shaking her head. “No matter how hard you try, you are always gonna be a white man, the whole rest of your life.”
“I expect I am,” I said, taking a bite of bread.
We watched the moon rising over the swamp from Abraham’s front porch. We heard the gank, gank of the bullfrogs and the occasional soft call of a mourning dove staying up late.
We sat in silence for a while. Then Moody spoke.
“You think they coming tonight?”
I sighed. “You know they’ll want to teach us a lesson.”
We heard a groan from inside. Moody leaped up and I followed her into the parlor.
