Free My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Page B

the kids would look back at us with similar fascination. We might as well have lived on different planets.
    But if their mothers or fathers did housekeeping or sewing or yard work, they would often bring their young children along and we would play together. Churches and schools might be separated, but commerce was different, and trading for services was the way people got to know one another back then. And all children are color-blind unless they’re taught otherwise.
    We had some favorite friends, Sevitra and Brusker Fannin, whose mother, Martene, was a schoolteacher who also had an upholstering and sewing business at home. Mother often drove out to her house to drop off fabrics or pick up finished pieces. Robbie and I always went along to play. The Fannins lived on rolling farmland a few miles north of town, and they had the softest, sandiest soil in their yard, like a sandy beach or flour that had been carefully sifted, so that it felt wonderful on bare feet. We loved playing with Sevitra and Brusker, just running around like crazy while our mothers visited inside.
    It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and playing hard made us thirsty. There was a covered well beside the house, and one afternoon we all climbed up there for a drink of water. Brusker lifted aside the wooden lid and dropped a bucket deep into the well, while we gathered around in a circle, staring down into the hole. After Brusker hoisted the bucket up with a rope, he filled a metal dipper and started passing it around. Everybody took a sip, and then it was my turn. This was the time of polio, and I’d been raised never to drink after anybody. I didn’t even drink after my brothers. Now the prospect of sharing seemed even more illicit, and thrilling. I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be doing , I thought, as I held the dipper to my lips and drank long and deeply. It was the coolest, sweetest drink of water I’d had in my life. In that moment I had an epiphany. From then on I would trust my own instincts about people and their rules. If I always did what was expected, I might miss out on the most wonderful things in life.
    I started riding cows at a young age. My parents thought I was too little for a pony, so I decided the old milk cow that grazed in the fields across from our house would have to do. My girlfriend Vickie Johns would run the cow down in the gully and I’d jump on its back. Then I’d run it down in the gully and she’d jump on its back. We’d ride that cow until we got pitched off, then we’d start all over again. One day a lady called my mother and said, “Mrs. Spacek, do you know your daughter and her little friend are out back riding a cow?” When I got home my mother said, “Honey, you shouldn’t be riding that cow. You might sour its milk.”
    Vickie Johns and I were always having adventures together. Sometimes in the summer months, when Vickie was sleeping over with me, we’d wait until everybody was asleep in the house and then slip out for midnight walks around town. In our pajamas. We couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, and I can’t tell you why we did it other than for the thrill of doing something forbidden. Of course we would take Vickie’s old dog, Queenie, along with us for protection, as we walked the back streets toward town, past the empty brick school buildings, past the church, through the cemetery with the moon throwing scary shadows between the rows of stones (we hurried a little through this part), and then looped back into the center of town with its quiet shuttered stores. We weren’t afraid of anything except getting caught by the night watchman, Shorty Horton. There was no crime to speak of in Quitman back then, and we didn’t have much of a police department. The county sheriffs and Shorty were the only protectors of public order while the city slept.
    Shorty’s nickname was not ironic; he was a very, very small man who wore a large cowboy hat and cowboy boots and