Free The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas Page B

and gave me a funny look. “It might be Blue.” The Massies had become so much a part of our lives that it was hard to remember when they weren’t living in the shack. Grover would come across sticks laid in a strange pattern in the field and know Blue had left them as an omen. Or I’d look up from my work in the kitchen and see Zepha standing in the door with Baby, both of them silent as Indians. Sometimes I’d come home and find an old scrap of home-dyed goods tucked in the screen and know she’d sent Sonny with it. Every now and then, I caught Sonny sitting in the Studebaker, pretending he was listening to the radio. At first, I felt queer when these things happened, but now we were used to the Massies’ ways.
    “Maybe he’s going to let us know he found a snake up in a cottonwood,” I said. Blue had told Grover that if we saw a black snake in a tree, we’d have rain in three days.
    “That’s crazy. I’ve never seen a snake in a tree,” I said when Grover told me.
    “You’ve probably never seen rain, either.” We’d both been checking trees ever since.
    I moved out from under the cottonwood while I watched the man disappear into a gully. When he came out into view and started down the rise, we saw it wasn’t a man at all.
    “It’s not Blue. It’s Zepha,” Grover said. “Why do you suppose she’s moving so fast?” I didn’t have any idea, but it couldn’t be anything but trouble, so I wrapped up Graver’s pie and put the dinner things back into the basket. Grover wouldn’t be eating his dessert. By the time I was done, Zepha was within hailing distance.
    “Hey, you, Zepha. We’re over here. Is everything all right?” Grover yelled. Sometimes Grover isn’t so smart. If everything had been all right, Zepha wouldn’t have been running in the heat without her sunbonnet.
    “Miz Bean,” Zepha called as she slowed down. She didn’t say anything more until she reached us. Then she had to catch her breath before she could speak. While she did that, I tried to think what could be wrong at the house. Then I realized she hadn’t come from home, but from the direction of the hired man’s shack. I hoped Sonny and Baby were all right.
    I held out a hand to her and led her into the shade, then reached into the basket for the jar of lemonade and held it out, but she shook her head. Instead, while she gasped for breath, she picked at a thorn in her bare foot.
    “There’s a woman come along,” she said after what seemed like a long, long wait. “She was in a Model A. A skinny woman with a face like a lizard and no lips. She said to tell you to come a runnin’, Miz Bean. Her sister’s time’s come.”
    “What’s that?” Grover asked. None of what Zepha said made sense to him, but it did to me.
    “That was Agnes T. Ritter. Zepha means Rita’s gone into labor,” I told him. “She’s early.”
    Zepha nodded her head up and down. “She couldn’t find you at your place, so she come to the shack to ask if us’ns knew where you was. She sez it’s bad. I wondered if maybe that baby’s sideways. I knew of that happening to a woman onct. I can’t think who ‘twas. She got bloated up when the baby wouldn’t come and screamed for two days and went crazy from the pain. When that baby finally got borned, Granny Grace, who ketched it, she couldn’t save it. The woman died a-yellin’, and her old man went around the rest of his life with his hands over his ears to keep out the sound. Now, what was her name?”
    My stomach felt queasy, and I looked over at Grover, who was pale. “There was another woman,” Zepha started, but I shook my head and pointed to Grover. Zepha understood and didn’t tell the story, but she said fiercely, “Your man ought to hear about it. Men need to know the trouble they cause us’ns. They ought to have a baby just one time, and have it through their nose, too. That’d teach ‘em.”
    Zepha looked at Grover as if a woman’s trouble was all his fault. Then she