Free KooKooLand by Gloria Norris Page A

nothing.
    I tried to tell her what was wrong.
    Powers gonna die! Powers gonna die! I shrieked.
    Hush, it’s all right, she said, as she rocked me back and forth.
    Powers gonna die. Powers gonna die.
    What a crybaby, said Jimmy. Boo hoo hoo.
    Shirley carried me away from him. Carried me up past the field where Grampy had built a baseball diamond for his seven kids. Up into the fields where the strawberries were. Rows and rows of strawberries that Grampy grew and sold for money.
    She plucked a berry as big as my fist and handed it to me. I ate it and then ate another. The snot dripping down my chin mixed with the strawberry juice and made pink snot and I stopped crying.
    She told me how she had loved berries when she was a little girl. How she would eat them when she was supposed to be picking them to sell.
    I ate more berries and listened to Shirley’s stories and couldn’t get enough of either one.
    Shirley had been born and raised right there on the farm. She picked strawberries all summer long and ate them with warm, sweet shortcake from Grammy’s wood-burning stove and buttery cream from Grampy’s cow.
    Old Gutless is what they called the cow.
    Hickville is what Jimmy called Tusket, Shirley’s hometown.
    Stump-jumpers, he called Shirley’s family. Clodhoppers. Real greenhorns.
    They didn’t know the first thing about how to bet a trifecta. They didn’t know where to get the strongest highballs in New York City. And they wouldn’t be able to find their way around the Combat Zone with a map and a compass.
    They played games with funny names. Pinochle. Parcheesi. Crokinole.
    They bet matchsticks—if they bet at all—and surely not on Sunday.
    They had no TV. The kitchen had a cold-water pump. And the bathroom was out in a shed that smelled like people had been doing their business in there for a million years. The curling strips of flypaper caught some of the flies buzzing around your keister but not all of them and the rest you had to shoo off with a newspaper from 1943.
    In the winter it was too cold for flies or people out there and you did your business crouched over a pot with your legs trembling from trying not to move too much. Then you climbed into bed, where the brick Grampy had heated on the wood-burning stove to keep you warm was already stone cold.
    The big deal of the day was going to the post office to wait for the mail. I went with my uncle Whitfield, but Jimmy wouldn’t be caught dead in there listening to all the farmers talk about their chicken feed and their half-wit cousins. Instead, he spent the day hunting or fishing and getting half-lit. Then he’d sit around Grammy’s kitchen at night and ask the stump-jumpers if they wanted to play crokinole for hard cash.
    Not that he was serious or anything. He was just trying to get a rise out of them. He wouldn’t be caught dead playing a game with a goofy name like crokinole.
    Finally, everything came to a head one night when Jimmy called Uncle Whitfield’s horse an old nag ready for the glue factory. Uncle Whitfield loved that horse and called Jimmy uncouth and Jimmy nearly decked Uncle Whitfield. Grampy took Shirley out to the barn and asked her if she had married an outlaw.
    No, said Shirley, that’s just how American men are.
    Then maybe you want to come back home to Canada, he suggested.
    But Shirley didn’t want to go back home. Ever since she was a little girl she had dreamed of getting off that damn farm and seeing the United States of America. She had been picking red strawberries and churning white cream until she was blue in the face. Been doing it ever since she left school in the eighth grade to help out on the farm ’cause girls didn’t go past the eighth gradeup there. They just married boys in baggy pants with horse manure on their clodhoppers, had nine or ten kids like Grammy, and, according to Shirley, looked like old hags by twenty-seven.
    By the time she was